Just a heads-up that I have updated the Automating the Deployment of Log Insight post to handle the new features (allow extra config and root password)…
Cloud Architecture and Observability
Tag: ovftool
I was attempting to deploy a VM as a vCloud template into a vCloud Director instance using ovftool and ran into an interesting problem. I could successfully deploy a VM, but I could not create a vCloud template using ovftool even though the documentation stated this was possible. What was going on?
Log Insight ships as a virtual appliance. Given its single packaging model, automated deployment is easy thanks to the freely available OVF Tool. OVF Tool is a command line utility available for Windows, Linux and Mac that allows you to deploy OVA/OVF files. For the list of options available with OVF Tool run ovftool –help or see check the documentation. I would like to walk you through how to automate the deployment of Log Insight via ovftool.
So I have been doing a lot of work with OVF Tool as of late. In addition, I have been trying hard to ensure that all VMware scripts that I create can be run natively on my Mac (no particular reason). While going through this exercise I ran into some interesting error messages when attempting to deploy OVAs using OVF Tool 3.0.1 on Mac.
This might be common knowledge, but it tripped me up recently so thought I would write a quick post on it. OVF Tool allows you to pass credential information to destination connections. The syntax of such commands is:
<protocol>://[<username>[:<password>]@]<host>[:<port>][<misc>]
An issue that might arise is that the password being passed has special characters. One password special character that would cause an issue is ‘@’ as it is used to separate a password from a host.
How do you escape special characters to avoid this issue?