OVF provisioning concepts

The following topics describe how to do Open Virtualization Format (OVF) provisioning:

• Preparing to perform OVF provisioning
• Creating the input file
• Capturing a VM and staging it as a template and a VGP
• Running the captureAndStageVM command
• Checking the job results
• Using an existing OVF file and staging it as a template and VGP

The preceding topics explain how to use the following BLCLI commands in the VMCaptureJob namespace:

• captureAndStageVM— Creates and runs a VM Capture Job. This job accomplishes the following:
  • Captures a Virtual Center virtual machine (VM) as an OVF file and one or more Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) files.
    The OVF file contains configuration details such as CPU, memory, networking, storage, and so on.
    The VMDK files contain payload data. Each VMDK file corresponds to a single data disk of the VM.
  • Transports the OVF file and VMDK file(s) to a provisioning datastore.
  • Takes the information from the OVF file and uses it to create templates on the target Virtual Center server(s).
  • After it creates the templates, it creates one corresponding Virtual Guest Package (VGP) in the BMC Server Automation system.
• importVM — Assumes that an OVF file is already present on the provisioning datastore. It takes information from the OVF file and creates templates on target Virtual Center servers, then creates a corresponding VGP.