This is expected behavior.
OVF templates created in a 6.7 environments can only be deployed into 6.7 environments with the vSphere Client (HTML5) as it supports OVF files that contains an NVRAM file.
Workaround:
To work around this issue:
- Export the OVF from the 6.7 environment.
- Once exported, edit the OVF file and remove all the NVRAM entries:
<File ovf:id="file3" ovf:href="<VM Name>.nvram" ovf:size="8684"/>
<vmw:ExtraConfig ovf:required="false" vmw:key="nvram" vmw:value="ovf:/file/file3"/>
Notes: If using the OVFtool make sure to use the skipManifestCheck. This allows the OVF to be created after removing the references to NVRAM. Without this command, the OVF Tool would not be able to confirm the manifest file and will return an error.
How to use ovftool:
- Download the ovftool
- Open a Windows command prompt with administrator privileges (cmd.exe)
- Navigate to the directory where you installed ovftool (by default: cd “<C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware> OVF Tool”)
- To deploy VM from OVF template run this command:
ovftool.exe --X:logLevel=trivia --X:logToConsole --skipManifestCheck --datastore=datastorename "<path file of ovf>" "vi://administrator:Password@<vCenter FQDN or IP>/Datacenter/host/Cluster/<Host IP or FQDN>"
For example:C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool> ovftool.exe --X:logLevel=trivia --X:logToConsole --skipManifestCheck --datastore=iSCI_1 "C:\vcenter_ovf" "vi://administrator:Password@[email protected]/DC_1/ESXI_1/CL_1/ESXi_1"
Notes:
- These flags enable trivia logging and output to command prompt which assists with troubleshooting if ovftool fails:.--X:logLevel=trivia --X:logToConsole
- Some additional flags may be required in order to successfully export or deploy:
--skipManifestCheck
--disableVerification
--X:skipContentLength
--noSSLVerify
--acceptAllEulas