Export to OVF/OVA fails with error “Export failed: Unknown error”

Products

• VMware Desktop Hypervisor

Issue/Introduction

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
5. Export of OVF/OVA fails with “Export failed: Unknown error”

Environment

• VMware Workstation Pro 16.2.x (Linux)
• VMware Workstation Player 16.2.x (Linux)
• Rhel 8 or above
• Fedora 27 or above
• Suse Linux 15 or above

Cause

VMware Workstation Export OVF/OVA feature requires libnsl to 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 Linux versions libnsl/other packages 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.

Resolution

Verify that ovftool binary is running or not using the below command

# /usr/bin/ovftool

If any error is seen, install the package as follows:

On Rhel# yum install <packageName>

On Fedora# dnf install <packageName>

On Suse Linux# zypper install <packageName>