3 Best Practices When Exporting Virtual Machines to OVF Format

One of the questions that we are constantly asked is "How do I migrate my existing machines to the cloud?" Several vendors have answered this question by developing software solutions to aid in this process, but they can be very costly and complicated to implement. Fortunately, there is a simple and free method that has been adopted by practically all virtualization platforms: OVF.

OVF stands for Open Virtualization Format. It is an open standard for packaging virtual machines regardless of platform or processor architecture. It also compresses the virtual machine disks file to make transport easier. Once a machine has been packaged as OVF, it can easily be transferred and imported to most virtual platforms, making migrating to the cloud much simpler.

A virtual machine that has been exported to OVF will contain at least the following two items:

• A descriptor file (.ovf), which contains virtual machine metadata such as hardware, network information, and references to media files.
• A disk image file for each virtual hard disk on the machine. This is usually in .vmdk (VMware) or .vhd (Hyper-V) format.

As a busy sysadmin, finding the time to package up and transfer a virtual machine can be difficult enough, so the last thing you want is for the import to fail. Below are some best practices to avoid the most common issues we see when exporting OVF files.