Since I use terraform to clone and provision VMs on ESXi, I need to use VMWare’s ovftool. However, I’ve been having errors lately. The OVFTool wants to install using python2, and I keep getting syntax errors. Seems like it’s using my Python3 install and I can’t get it to install.

If we cannot install the ovftool via the conventional way, we have to find a detour or a workaround to get there. For this particular issue with the failed installation on Ubuntu 20.04, this means extracting the ovftool files from the installation .bundle, copying them to /usr/bin/ and configure an alias for the ovftool executable.

Execute ovftool without installing it

This is how it works step-by-step:

Extract the files and change into directory ovftool (you can name the extracted directory as you want):

sudo ./VMware-ovftool-4.4.1-16812187-lin.x86_64.bundle --extract ovftool && cd ovftool

ls -rtl

total 16K
drwxr-xr-x 4 root   root         4,0K Mär  9 14:07 .
drwxr-xr-x 5 rguske domain^users 4,0K Mär  9 14:07 ..
drwxr-xr-x 9 root   root         4,0K Mär  9 14:07 vmware-installer
drwxr-xr-x 6 root   root         4,0K Mär  9 14:07 vmware-ovftool
Here’s what’s in it:

$ tree -L 2
.
├── vmware-installer
│   ├── artwork
│   ├── bin
│   ├── bootstrap
│   ├── lib
│   ├── manifest.xml
│   ├── python
│   ├── sopython
│   ├── vmis
│   ├── vmis-launcher
│   ├── vmware-installer
│   ├── vmware-installer.py
│   ├── vmware-uninstall
│   └── vmware-uninstall-downgrade
└── vmware-ovftool
    ├── certs
    ├── env
    ├── icudt44l.dat
    ├── libcares.so.2
    ├── libcrypto.so.1.0.2
    ├── libcurl.so.4
    ├── libexpat.so
    ├── libgcc_s.so.1
    ├── libgoogleurl.so.59
    ├── libicudata.so.60
    ├── libicuuc.so.60
    ├── libssl.so.1.0.2
    ├── libssoclient.so
    ├── libstdc++.so.6
    ├── libvim-types.so
    ├── libvmacore.so
    ├── libvmomi.so
    ├── libxerces-c-3.2.so
    ├── libz.so.1
    ├── manifest.xml
    ├── open_source_licenses.txt
    ├── ovftool
    ├── ovftool.bin
    ├── README.txt
    ├── schemas
    ├── vmware.eula
    └── vmware-eula.rtf

11 directories, 31 files

Move the vmware-ovftool directory to /usr/bin/:

sudo mv vmware-ovftool /usr/bin/

Make the two files ovftool as well as ovftool.bin executable:

sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/vmware-ovftool/ovftool.bin
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/vmware-ovftool/ovftool

Configure an alias for your used shell to execute it as usual:

alias ovftool=/usr/bin/vmware-ovftool/ovftool

This allows me to run the ovftool as usual.