The other day I built a VirtualBox image that contains a close approximation of the server environment of one of our customers. The image contains Ubuntu 10.04 LTS server along with apache, PHP, MySQL, and everything else needed to run their Drupal site. Since VirtualBox 4, it's possible to export appliances in .ova format, so that's what I did, and I stuck it up on our network drive for everyone to use. Of course, I tested it first and it imported fine.
The problems started when other people tried to import the appliance and they got the fun message "Failed to import appliance ... Could not read OVF file 'basebox.ovf' (VERR_TAR_END_OF_FILE)." Oh, the one thing I forgot to mention is that I renamed the .ova file when I put it up on the network drive (sorry about that, Bill).
Do not rename your .ova files if you plan to import them with VirtualBox. What exactly is an .ova file? Read OVF? OVA? WTF? to find out. It's got a good explanation and links to some other resources. The interesting tidbit for us, as VirtualBox users, is that we can't rename our .ova files and expect them to import because (apparently, and I probably just didn't read the fine print) the base name of the .ova file is also used in the names of the files (or at least the important ones) contained in the .ova archive.
Having trouble importing an .ova file and seeing VERR_TAR_END_OF_FILE? Run "tar tvf virtualboximage.ova" (where virtualboximage.ova is the name of your .ova file) and check out the names of the internal files. If the base names don't match, then rename your .ova to have the same base name as the internal .ovf file and try again.
Comments
Thanks!
Thanks Marc! I just did made this mistake, and this post was the first hit when I googled the error. Just what I needed to know!
+1
Me too. Kind of a silly way to make an archive file, but I won't blame VirtualBox for me not playing by their rules.
Mille Grazie...
I was about to start another 8 hour upload session because the recipient wasn't able to import my VM. Fortunately I found this page first and solved the problem by adding the two space characters to the file name that I removed after the export. Thanks a lot!
Thanks! It' works :)!
Thanks! It' works :)!
Thanks!!!
Issue resovled .. Thanks dude
Thanks Marc!
Was road blocked by this issue for over an hour, hearing 'Well, it worked fine on everyone else's'. Thanks so much for documenting this and making it SEO friendly enough to be easily tracked down.
Thanks!
Thanks a ton!!! You saved me a lot of potential pain of downloading the multi-GB VM again or worse patching/reinstalling VM Ware and Virtual Box on a linux machine to try and figure out what was going on. Thanks!
.ova removal after import
Hello out there...
Is it OK to remove the .ova file after the application was imported into the VirtualBox. I mean, it's a 14Gb plus.
Thanks for any useful response, from the Netherlands.
Maybe
If the import created a copy in the directory that holds the working VirtualBox instances, then it should be okay.
But, without seeing your setup, it's hard to say, and I always urge caution when deleting potentially important, irreplaceable files. I would test this by creating a copy of the .ova file on an external drive, and then removing the original. If everything works, then you're set. If not, then restore the backed up copy.
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