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I don't have ESXi inhouse, but am building a VM for a customer and they have two environments, an ESXi5.5 deployment and a 6.7.

At the moment I'm only able to export to an OVF/OVA format, which (for my customer) has worked in their 6.7 environment as I've downloaded the (Linux) version of Workstation 15 and am wondering how on earth I get to export the VM for ESX5.5. The VMware forums and online help don't seem to have been updated for Workstation 15 as they refer to a wizard which isn't available in the version of Workstation 15 that I have (only available in the paid version?)

I've also downloaded the VMware vCenter Converter (Windows version, standalone) as I was under the impression that that would be able to do convert anything to anything and therefore do what I needed, but it will only allow me to export to a 5.5 ESXi server within my environment, which I don't have.

What I'm looking at doing is building a VM that can be used in any ESXi environment, so I guess I should ask: what really is the best tool for me to be able to do that, considering that I don't have ESXi deployed here and am using VMWare Workstation and VirtualBox.

I had hoped that OVA/OVF would be a standard, and perhaps that's correct for newer VMWare Type I hypervisors?

bnoeafk
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  • So I've sorted out the ESX5.5 issue (VMX had a sata0.present set to true whereas all disks were SCSI) as well as the OVA being SHA1 checksummed as opposed to SHA256 (sorted through the ovftool) ... but the question really still stands, is there no one utility that covers all eventualities? – bnoeafk Jul 02 '19 at 18:46

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My assumption is that you're running into an issue where the VM of a specific hardware version cannot be imported to the 5.5 environment. Each version of vSphere has a compatible hardware version, they're listed here: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.7/com.vmware.vsphere.vm_admin.doc/GUID-64D4B1C9-CD5D-4C68-8B50-585F6A87EBA0.html

To downgrade an existing VM's hardware, you can manually create a new (custom) VM in Workstation and when asked for the Virtual Disk, point to the existing disks you have already created. Additional information: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1028019

Kyle Ruddy
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