OVA/OVF Deployment Fails or Hangs at 50% with "not well-formed (invalid token)"
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OVA/OVF Deployment Fails or Hangs at 50% with "not well-formed (invalid token)"

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Article ID: 448160

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Updated On:

Products

VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

When attempting to deploy a Virtual Appliance via an OVA or OVF template, you experience the following symptoms:

  • vSphere Client UI Hangs: The deployment progress bar reaches exactly 50% and remains stuck indefinitely.

  • No Error in UI: No error message is displayed in the vSphere Client interface; the task eventually times out or stays in a pending/waiting state.

  • Content Library Logs (cls.log): Checking /var/log/vmware/content-library/cls.log on the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) reveals that the large disk file (.vmdk) transfers successfully, but the companion metadata files (.nvram or .mf) are locked in a perpetual WAITING state:
    name => ####-####-####-####.vmdk, status => DONE,
    name => ####-####-####-####.nvram, bytes_transferred => 0, status => WAITING

  • OVF Tool Command Line Failure: Attempting to bypass the vCenter UI and deploy using the standalone VMware OVF Tool fails immediately with the following error:
    Opening OVA source: C:\Temp\example-app.ova
    Error:
     - Line 1: Could not parse the document: 'not well-formed (invalid token)'.
    Completed with errors

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 8.0

Cause

This issue is caused by a structural syntax corruption within the XML descriptor (.ovf file) packaged inside the OVA archive.

During the vendor's export or packaging process, invalid tokens or corrupt characters were written to the XML schema (often on Line 1). When vCenter's Staging Service (vpxd-svcs/cls) attempts to process the package, it is unable to parse the malformed XML. This causes the internal state machine to lock up, leaving the transfer of subsequent files (like .nvram) permanently stalled.

Resolution

Contact the Vendor to request a newly packaged OVA file.

If the vendor has hardcoded proprietary configurations, security certificates, or customized boot scripts inside the .nvram file, stripping it may cause the operating system to fail to boot.

  1. Do not modify the OVA package.

  2. Gather the console log output from the VMware OVF Tool demonstrating the parsing error: Line 1: Could not parse the document: 'not well-formed (invalid token)'.

  3. Open a support ticket with your third-party application vendor.

  4. Provide them with the error log and request a newly packaged, verified, and structurally valid .ova distribution.

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