How to deploy VMware vSphere Integrated Containers (OVA) on ESXi

Normally it’s quite hard to deploy an OVA on your ESXi (free) when you don’t have a vCenter in place. In the past William Lam wrote how you could deploy an OVA on an Apple Mac OS X with govc. I used that as basis for the deployment of VIC with a Windows based environment.

The first step is off course to download the OVA and the govc tool for your Windows installation.  Upload the OVA to your datastore of your ESXi host and open a command prompt and browse to your govc tool and paste the following:

set GOVC_INSECURE=1
set GOVC_URL=$IP
set GOVC_USERNAME=$USERNAME
set GOVC_PASSWORD=$PASSWORD
set GOVC_DATASTORE=$DATASTORE
set GOVC_NETWORK="VM Network"
set GOVC_RESOURCE_POOL=Resources

If you run something like below command you’ll see some information about your host:

C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Downloads>govc_windows_amd64 about
Name: VMware ESXi
Vendor: VMware, Inc.
Version: 6.5.0
Build: 6765664
OS type: vmnix-x86
API type: HostAgent
API version: 6.5
Product ID: embeddedEsx
UUID:

After the you can request the import specification of the OVA trough:

govc_windows_amd64 import.spec vic-v1.2.1-4104e5f9.ova > vic.json
notepad vic.json and change:
{"Key":"appliance.root_pwd","Value":"$PASSWORD"}
{"Name":"Network","Network":"$NETWORK"}
{"Key":"network.fqdn","Value":"$FQDN"}
"Name":"$NAME"
govc_windows_amd64 import.ova -options=vic.json vic-v1.2.1-4104e5f9.ova

This will result in:

C:\Users\%USERNAME%\Downloads>govc_windows_amd64 import.ova -options=vic.json vic-v1.2.1-4104e5f9.ova
[10-12-17 00:23:14] Uploading vic-4104e5f9-disk1.vmdk... OK00%, 12.0MiB/s)
[10-12-17 00:23:21] Uploading vic-4104e5f9-disk2.vmdk... OK00%, 11.7MiB/s)

You can edit the new Virtual Machine how you want it trough the ESXi UI!

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