Failure Deploying OVF with Multiple Disks to vCenter

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

• Deployment using OVFTool completes successfully.
• However, when deploying the same OVF via the vCenter UI, the deployment succeeds only if a single VMDK is attached.
• Deployment consistently fails when multiple VMDKs are attached to the VM. The process is significantly slow when initiated from either the vCenter UI or directly from the ESXi host. Eventually, the deployment fails with the following error message displayed in the vCenter interface.
  Failed to deploy OVF package. Cause: A general system error occurred: Transfer failed: IO error during transfer: java.io.EOFException.

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 8.x

Cause

This issue can occur if the transfer.threads.poolSize in /etc/vmware-content-library/config/ts-config.properties is reduced to 1 from the default value of 20.

The deployment slowness and failure occurs due to a configuration change in the Content Library settings. Specifically, the parameter transfer.throttling.bandwidth.total.mbitsec in the file /etc/vmware-content-library/config/ts-config.properties was set to 1, which imposes a strict bandwidth limit of 1 Mbit/sec on content transfers.

Resolution

To address the thread limitation during OVF deployments with multiple VMDKs, reset the transfer thread pool settings in the /etc/vmware-content-library/config/ts-config.properties file on the vCenter Server:

1. SSH into the vCenter Server.

2. Navigate to: /etc/vmware-content-library/config

3. Open the ts-config.properties file for editing.

4. Update the following parameters:

   • transfer.threads.poolSize=20 (was set to 1, default: 20) 

   • transfer.threads.priorityPoolSize=5 (default: 5) 

   • transfer.throttling.bandwidth.total.mbitsec=0 (was set to 1, default: 0)

5. Restart the Content Library service to apply the changes by running below command.

         service-control --restart vmware-content-library

These adjustments ensure sufficient thread availability for handling simultaneous VMDK transfers during OVF deployments.

Additional Information

How to update Content Library configuration settings in the vCenter Appliance