Importing OVAs with disks larger than 2TB into a vCenter Content Library fails

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

• Uploading OVAs to the Content Library fails when they contain disk files that are configured with over 2TB of space.
• The cls.log located in vCenter - /var/log/vmware/content-library has messages similar to the following:
  

  Unable to parse disk image while uploading to: ds:/vmfs/volumes/<datastore-uuid>/<contentlib-uuid>/<OVA-name>.vmdk com.vmware.transfer.streamVmdk.VmdkFormatException: Invalid disk format (capacity too large)

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 7.0.x

Cause

This is caused by an unexpected limitation in the Content Library file-size logic. Note that the actual size of the OVA files does not matter in this issue as much as the configured vmdk sizes of the VM.

Resolution

This is resolved in vCenter Server 7.0 Update 3L (build number 21477706).

Workaround:
Reduce the disk sizes before creating the OVA.