Importing Virtual Appliances

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Been working with the Citrix Access Gateway VPX.  However we have ESX 3.5 not ESX 4.0 (vSphere).

This means we get the error

Line 25: Unsupported hardware family 'vmx_07'

when importing the OVF.  Grrrrr.  So how do you get round this?  Pretty simple really - hey that's becoming a catch phrase!  There are a couple of ways I used this one using OVFTool.

Download and install the OVF Tool (I used version 2) from VMWare.

Next convert the non-working OVF to a VMX like this

ovftool citrixappliance.ovf citrixappliance_conv.vmx

Make sure you name the out file something different to the original ovf name otherwise this wont work the tool fails to create a file as it already exists - i think this is the vmdk file

Once you have your vmx (and vmdk and mf) you can happily edit the vmx xml file in notepad. 

Change the line:

virtualhw.version = "7"

to

virtualhw.version = "4"

save the vmx file and convert it back to an OVF using the following

ovftool citrixappliance_conv.vmx new_citrixappliance.ovf

import the new appliance into vCenter and delete all your un-required files.

IIRC you need at least vSphere client to import the appliance using the GUI but you can use OVFTool too.

ovftool new_citrixappliance.ovf vi://esxhostname/

the tool will ask you for a datastore however you can put this in the command line

ovftool -ds "VMFSName" new_citrixappliance.ovf vi://esxhostname/

You might even need to map the network inside the OVF to your vSwitches

ovftool -nw "vSwitchName" -ds "VMFSName" new_citrixappliance.ovf vi://esxhostname/

One thing to note is that the options/switches MUST come first order matters in this program.

If all else fails try

ovftool --help

Hope that helps.

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