Error: "Transfer session ######################## no longer exists (timed out)" while doing OVF upload

Products

• VMware Cloud Director
• VMware Telco Cloud Platform

Issue/Introduction

• When attempting to upload an OVF package into a VCD tenant VDC content library, the transfer operation fails to complete.
• The progress indicator inside the UI either reaches a specific threshold such as 1% and remains completely stuck indefinitely, or the operation terminates with a session timeout error.
• This behavior typically blocks the onboarding of specific virtual appliances or customised templates into the cloud environment, even though the same OVF package can be deployed successfully when targeting an underlying vCenter Server directly.

Environment

 

• VCD: 10.x
• TCP: 2, 3, 4.x, 5.x

 

Cause

• This issue occurs due to an incorrect VM disk size configuration or a mismatch in the disk size parameters within the OVF descriptor file. VCD cannot process the descriptor properly, which triggers a transfer session timeout.
• As an Example, as seen in your logs, the imported disk is larger ... '<VM DISK>.vmdk', (7,864,320,000 / 7,650,676,224 bytes transferred) ...
• The first value represents the actual number of bytes that the client attempted to write or stream during the session, while the second value represents the target disk capacity expected by the OVF descriptor block definition.
• Because the streaming data size exceeds the allocation bounds declared in the OVF metadata (7,864,320,000 bytes streamed vs 7,650,676,224 bytes expected), VCD halts ingestion, leaving the transfer operation permanently unfinalized until the session expires.
• This discrepancy is frequently caused by external export tools or transfering the file over Windows, adding padding data to the stream optimized VMDK file that does not align with the strict 512-byte sector boundary definitions expected by the OVF metadata descriptor.

 

 

Resolution

To immediately resolve this issue, edit the OVF descriptor directly

• Take a backup of the original OVF descriptor (.ovf) file before making modifications.
• Open the OVF descriptor file in a text editor.
• Locate the virtual machine disk configuration sections.
• Verify and correct the exact byte size and streamoptimized VMDK parameters to ensure accuracy.
• Save the file and retry the upload to VCD.