How To Export VMX to OVA in VMware Fusion 11
How To Export VMX to OVA in VMware Fusion 11
Introduction
While migrating to a new iMac ran into an issue involving a VM being corrupted after migrating to the new iMac, luckily the old iMac was still available to access the VM. When digging into the VMware Fusion interface did not see a GUI entry for exporting a VMX to OVA, only import feature. With a bit of digging found that the ovftool is installed and you can use the CLI method to export to OVA format for importing. In this post we will cover just how to export to an OVA.
Exporting a VM in VMWare Fusion
For the most part we will be running a single command to export. First open terminal and change to the directory where the ovftool resides, this is in the “/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/VMware OVF Tool/” directory. Type the command:
cd /Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/VMware\ OVF\ Tool/
The VM we will be migrating is a Windows 10 that resides in the ~/Documents/Virtual Machines.localized directory. Getting to the directories is easy when using the TAB key for auto completion, cuts down on typo’s.
Make sure the VM is powered off before starting.
Type the following. ./ovftool --acceptAllEulas ~/Documents/Virtual\ Machines.localized/Windows\ 7.vmwarevm/Windows\ 7.vmx ~/Documents/Win7.ova
Press Return and wait.
Once the export has completed you now have a file to import in VMware Fusion.
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