Tuesday 2 September 2014

Deploying OVA fails with "Failed to Deploy OVF/OVA package: The operation is not supported on the object"

We recently had an issue deploying either an OVA/OVF file that was created from one of the virtual machines in our environment.  Deploying this OVA failed instantly (after entering cluster locations / datastore) with the following error: "The Operation is not supported on the object".  After much investigation and examining the /var/log/hostd.log file on the ESXi host we were trying to deploy too, we found the line:  "Video Ram size edit is not supported when auto-detect is True."  Editing the Virtual Machine hardware settings and editing the Video Card and changing the setting from Auto-detect to Specify custom settings (This can be anything) and then exporting the virtual machine as an OVA allowed the deployment to work! Very interesting that this setting caused a problem!  Previously we have also encountered this when the Virtual Machine has an ISO mounted when to converting to OVA.

15 comments:

  1. Beers and peanuts and much appreciation to you. I flipped one of my VMs to 1024x768, exported it to OVA, and deployed it without trouble. If any asks me I'm gonna tell 'em that you da man.

    Thanks for sharing your insight. Cheers

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    1. Thanks. Good to hear that this blog has helped someone!!

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  2. Thank you, your post has helped me too :)

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  3. I just had this issue but thought nah it won't be the display driver as I've not done anything special to the display here. It was just a Windows VM that I was using OVF to export over to another vCenter instance. I thought I'd I'll look in hostd.log file for some clues anyway, then what do I see in there? "Video Ram size edit is not supported when auto-detect is True" :o/

    So I changed it to some other setting, re-export my ovf and the import then worked!

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  4. Was encountering this exact problem migrating VM's from a VMWare workstation environment over to ESXi 5.5 and this solution fixed us up right away. Thanks for the post.

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    1. Glad people still find this blog useful sometimes! I should really put more updates in here

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    2. You're one of the top results when googling some of these VmWare issues. Maybe you should monetize this blog and make some scratch on the side.

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  5. Still relevant! I had this problem just now. :)

    I didn't want to re-export the whole machine, so I edited the OVF in Notepad, and changed "useAutoDetect" to "false".

    VMware noticed the changed file hash, and interpreted it as corruption, so I deleted the corresponding .mf file. Now VMware is importing it smoothly.

    Thanks - I never would have checked the video memory. :-O

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  6. You are THE MAN! I ran into exact issue and your blog post came out very helpful. Cheers!!!

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  7. Replies
    1. Thanks, Glad the page is still useful, even after all this time!

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  8. yeah, it's still useful even now, in 2021 :) VMware seems to be continue to put a shit.... :))))

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