Deploy VMware OVA to Remote ESX

Often my customer site provides us with VMs that contain the framework which replicates their environment.  The big issue we have is that with only 8GB of RAM on the older corporate issued development laptops floating around, a VM that needs 6GB to run doesnt leave much space for jboss, eclipse and gwt developer. (And the usual Pandora, Outlook and Instant message client).

A work around I discovered is to deploy these virtual machines to a dedicated server running VMware ESX.

Traditionally I would upload an ISO to the datastore, create a VM configuration.  Mount the ISO, install the OS and configure the network settings manually.

If you already have a VM configured to use DHCP, then its a breeze with the ovftool offered by VMware.

The command is as follows:

ovftool -ds=datastore1 -nw="VM Network" -st=OVA C:\Users\Charles\Downloads\GM_Dev_Local-OWF6.ova vi://root:[password]@[host]

After 100%

That's it!