"Deployed an OVF with NVRAM is not supported" error deploying an OVF in vSphere 6.7

Products

VMware vCenter Server VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

Deploying an OVF located in a VMware Content Library fails in:
- 6.7 environment
- 6.5 environment or using the 6.7 vSphere Web
In the vSphere Web Client, you see entries similar to:

Deployed an OVF with NVRAM is not supported (incompatible vCenter version).
Using the OVFtool, in the ovftool.log file, you see entries similar to:

2019-02-12T16:15:31.101Z verbose OVFTool[70000E045000] [Originator@6876 sub=Default] Bad return code from POST request: 500
2019-02-12T16:15:31.108Z verbose OVFTool[109AE45C0] [Originator@6876 sub=Default] Exception thrown:
N5boost16exception_detail10clone_implINS0_19error_info_injectorI16OvfToolExceptionEEEE(Bad response code (500) from POST request)"

Note: The preceding log excerpts are only examples. Date, time, and environmental variables may vary depending on your environment.

Environment

VMware vSphere Web Client 6.7.x
VMware vSphere Web Client 6.5.x
VMware vCenter Server 6.7.x

Cause

An OVF exported from a virtual machine from a 6.7 environment now contains four types of files:

NVRAM
OVF
VMDK
MF

OVF files exported from a 6.5 environment does not generate a NVRAM file. Only the 6.7 HTML5 client recognizes the NVRAM file during import.

Resolution

This is expected behavior.

OVF templates created in a 6.7 environments can only be deployed into 6.7 environments with the vSphere Client (HTML5) as it supports OVF files that contains an NVRAM file.

Workaround:
To work around this issue:

Export the OVF from the 6.7 environment.
Once exported, edit the OVF file and remove all the NVRAM entries:

<File ovf:id="file3" ovf:href="<VM Name>.nvram" ovf:size="8684"/>
<vmw:ExtraConfig ovf:required="false" vmw:key="nvram" vmw:value="ovf:/file/file3"/>

Notes: If using the OVFtool make sure to use the skipManifestCheck. This allows the OVF to be created after removing the references to NVRAM. Without this command, the OVF Tool would not be able to confirm the manifest file and will return an error.

How to use ovftool:

Download the ovftool
Open a Windows command prompt with administrator privileges (cmd.exe)
Navigate to the directory where you installed ovftool (by default: cd “<C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware> OVF Tool”)
To deploy VM from OVF template run this command:

ovftool.exe --X:logLevel=trivia --X:logToConsole --skipManifestCheck --datastore=datastorename "<path file of ovf>" "vi://administrator:Password@<vCenter FQDN or IP>/Datacenter/host/Cluster/<Host IP or FQDN>"

For example:
C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool> ovftool.exe --X:logLevel=trivia --X:logToConsole --skipManifestCheck --datastore=iSCI_1 "C:\vcenter_ovf" "vi://administrator:Password@[email protected]/DC_1/ESXI_1/CL_1/ESXi_1"

Notes:

These flags enable trivia logging and output to command prompt which assists with troubleshooting if ovftool fails:.--X:logLevel=trivia --X:logToConsole
Some additional flags may be required in order to successfully export or deploy:

--skipManifestCheck
--disableVerification
--X:skipContentLength
--noSSLVerify
--acceptAllEulas

For further information on what the above flags refer to, see the following document: OVT Tool User's Guide Command-Line Options

For more information on the OVF Tool, see OVF Tool Documentation.