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Issue importing OVF to VirtualBox

Posted: 4. Jan 2021, 13:57
by Waddellgaz
Hello all,

First - my apologies if this is detailed else where on the forum. I've looked around and couldn't quite find a solution to fit my issue.

I'm attempting to export a VM from VMWarePlayer --> VirtualBox. I done this using OVFtool to export to OVF format (also tried OVA with no luck either). Within VirtualBox on attempting to import appliance I get this error;

Code: Select all

Failed to import appliance C:\Users\<username>\export.ovf.

Error reading "C:\Users\<username>\export.ovf": Host resource of type "Other Storage Device (20)" is supported with SATA AHCI controllers only, line 48 (subtype:vmware.nvme.controller).

Result Code: VBOX_E_FILE_ERROR (0x80BB0004)
Component: ApplianceWrap
Interface: IAppliance {86a98347-7619-41aa-aece-b21ac5c1a7e6}
Looking at line 48, I see this is for storage device NVME. I guess from the error description VirtualBox does not like this very much.

Code: Select all

<Item>
        <rasd:Address>0</rasd:Address>
        <rasd:Description>NVME Controller</rasd:Description>
        <rasd:Caption>nvmeController0</rasd:Caption>
        <rasd:InstanceID>3</rasd:InstanceID>
        <rasd:ResourceSubType>vmware.nvme.controller</rasd:ResourceSubType>
        <rasd:ResourceType>20</rasd:ResourceType>
      </Item>
From another forum page I seen some suggestions to manually edited the .ovf file by replacing
ElementName with Caption
vmware.sata.ahci with AHCI

I also deleted the .mf file.

After these steps still no luck though :(

Can anybody point me in the direction of documentation or steps to help get past this?

Kind regards
Gary

Re: Issue importing OVF to VirtualBox

Posted: 4. Jan 2021, 18:24
by scottgus1
I am not familiar with tweaking an OVF. It could be possible, if you can extract the full .vmdk from the compressed .vmdk in the appliance, you could build a new VM with settings as close as possible to the old VM. You might get the full .vmdk by extracting it with 7zip. But this is also something I have not done.

Virtualbox has a separate NVMe controller. This could be the source of the complaint.

Re: Issue importing OVF to VirtualBox

Posted: 6. Jan 2021, 00:29
by Martin
You could try to add a SATA controller to the VMware VM and remove the NVMe controller before exporting to OVF.