When running VMware Workstation 16.2.x and above on Linux host (Rhel 8 or above and Fedora 27 or above), Export to OVF/OVA is failing with error “Export failed: Unknown error”

Products

• VMware Desktop Hypervisor

Issue/Introduction

The purpose of this article is to document the above-described issue and inform customers that customer need to install the dependent library.

Symptoms:

1. Install Workstation on Linux Host (Rhel 8 or above and Fedora 27 and above)
2. Create a VM
3. Select the VM created above from the library, go to File->Export to OVF
4. Provide the path to export OVF and click on OK

Expected Results-
Export to OVF/OVA should happen successfully

Actual Results-
If export to OVF/OVA is failing with the error “Export failed: Unknown error”

Environment

VMware Workstation Pro 16.2.x (Linux)
VMware Workstation Player 16.2.x (Linux)

Resolution

To use the VMware Workstation Export OVF/OVA feature, libnsl should be installed on the system. The Export failure is due to a lack of libnsl.so on the system which prevents Ovftool from running. By default on the above mentioned OS versions libnsl is not found in library _base.cpython-38-x86_64-linux-gnu.so. libnsl.so has been deprecated for years and was removed from RHEL 8 (and Fedora 27 ) in 2018.


Solution:
Verify that an old version of libnsl.so is not present in the system
Verify that ovftool binary is running or not.
Run
# /usr/bin/ovftool
If any error related to libnsl is seen, please install libnsl package and proceed.

Install libnsl package as follows:
On Rhel
# yum install libnsl

On Fedora
# dnf install libnsl