Exporting virtual appliances

Use the export function to securely distribute virtual appliances to other systems.

Before you begin

You must be assigned one of the following permissions export virtual appliances:
  • System level, Cloud group administration role with permission to View all cloud resources (Read-only permission)
  • Resource level administration role with Write or All access rights permission (ACL) for a specific instance

About this task

The appliance is exported to a remote server by Secure Copy Protocol (SCP). SCP copies files and directories securely between remote hosts without starting an FTP session or logging into the remote systems explicitly.
You can use the console or the command line interface to complete this task. For the command line information, see the Related information section.
Important: If you experience a timeout when exporting a virtual appliance, see the VMware Knowledge base to learn about increasing the vCenter timeout value to correct this issue.

Procedure

  1. Click Patterns > Virtual Appliances.
  2. Select the virtual appliance that you want to export.
  3. Click the Export icon in the toolbar.
    Complete the following fields in the window:
    Remote host
    Specifies the remote host to which the virtual appliance will be exported.
    Remote path
    Specifies the remote path where the virtual appliance will be saved on the remote host.

    If the pathname ends in .ova, the file is saved to that location. Otherwise, the OVA file will be saved with the default name in the directory specified. Any directories in the path that do not already exist will be created.

    User name
    Specifies the user name that SCP will use to transfer the files to the virtual machine.
    Password
    Specifies the password for the user of the remote host. The Secure Copy Protocol (SCP) will use this password when copying the file to the remote host.
  4. Click OK.