convert vmdk to ova using ovftool

Question

I am trying to convert vmdk file to ova uisng ovftool

This is the command I type.

 C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool>ovftool -st=vmdk "C:\Windows Server 2016\win2trg1-1.vmdk" -tt=ova "C:\Windows Server 2016\win2trg1-1.ova"

However it did not work. The error is found below.

Error: Failed to parse option '-st=vmdk'. Reason: Source type not known: vmdk
Completed with errors

I am using windows 8 cmd and I did get help from this link. convert VMX to OVF using OVFtool. It did not work

Any solutions?

Answer 1

Try this command:

ovftool [original .vmx location and filename] [new .ova location and filename]

Example:

ovftool test_machine.vmx test_machine.ova

If you don't have .vmx then you can also say

ovftool test_machine.ovf test_machine.ovf

Answer 2

If you have VMware Workstation, you can open your VM (the .vmx file) and use File > Export to OVF.... This will create an OVF file that you can use in VirtualBox.

According to this post, an OVA file is just a TAR archive containing the OVF package files. So you could do it by hand.