There is a bug in vCenter 6.5 which occasionally happens when you deploy an OVA from web.
VMware is probably going to fix it, but until then when need to use a workaround.
OVA file is an archive which contains:
- .mf – manifest with checksums
- .ovf – XML with characteristics of the VM
- .vmdk – VM disks
- .cert – certificate – not necessary
When you deploy an OVA and the manifest file isn’t read within 100s after the deployment has been started vCenter will show a “Unable to retrieve manifest or certificate file” error.
To prevent this we need to add .mf (and .cert if exists) to the beginning of the archive.
Example
Let’s unpack the ova:
tar xvf example.ova
x example.ovf
x example.vmdk
x example.mf
So now we have:
ls -l
-rw-r--r-- 1 steve admins 6150411230 May 22 12:41 example.vmdk
-rw-r--r-- 1 steve admins 221 May 22 12:41 example.mf
-rw-r--r-- 1 steve admins 7625 May 22 12:41 example.ovf
Then we create the ova again, paying attention to add .mf (and .cert if exists) before .vmdk:
tar cvf example_fixed.ova example.ovf
tar uvf example.mf
tar uvf example.vmdk
Now we can deploy example_fixed.ova