vmwareify

What is it?

A Go library and application for creating VMWare friendly OVF files.

Use cases

This library makes it possible to create virtual appliances for VirtualBox and VMWare using a single OVF configuration.

For example, the packer automation tool can create VirtualBox and VMWare virtual machine appliances. However, this requires building the same VM twice; once for VirtualBox, and a second time for VMWare. Rather than build the same machine twice, this library allows us to build the VM once (for VirtualBox), and then convert the VirtualBox OVF into a VMWare friendly copy.

Additionally, not all VMWare tools are agnostic to the VirtualBox OVF parameters. Most notably, vSphere will reject VirtualBox OVFs. This library allows us to take an existing VirtualBox OVF, and use it with the more restrictive tools like vSphere.

API

The library provides several public functions for converting an OVF to a VMWare friendly copy. The most notable is the BasicConvert function, which converts an existing OVF into a VMWare friendly file. Here is an example application:

package main

import (
    "log"

    "github.com/stephen-fox/vmwareify"
)

func main() {
    err := vmwareify.BasicConvert("/some.ovf", "/some-vmware.ovf")
    if err != nil {
        log.Fatal("Failed to convert .ovf file - " + err.Error())
    }
}

Application usage

The included application can convert an existing OVF file into a VMWare friendly one like so:

go run cmd/vmwareify/main.go -f /some.ovf
# Creates '/some-vmware.ovf'.

Optionally, you can specify the output file using -o:

go run cmd/vmwareify/main.go -f /some.ovf -o /my-awesome-vmware.ovf