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Settings OK button greyed-out at OVA deployed on ESXi 7
When a Turnkey Linux OVA is deployed on a ESXi 7 server with vSphere 7 Client the "OK" button of the "Edit Settings" dialog is greyed-out.
After hours of searching and testing it turned out that the following lines in the *.vmx file were the cause
ide1:0.startConnected = "FALSE"
ide1:0.allowGuestConnectionControl = "FALSE"
ide1:0.deviceType = "atapi-cdrom"
ide1:0.fileName = "CD/DVD drive 0"
ide1:0.present = "TRUE"
After removing these lines from the *.vmk file the "OK" button became normal.
Note for editing the *.vmk file:
- shutdown VM
- remove VM from Inventory
- edit the *.vmx file (e.g. with the build in editor from WinSCP)
- "register VM" (select *.vmx file in the datastore)
Checked with turnkey-jenkins-16.1-buster-amd64.ova turnkey-trac-16.1-buster-amd64.ova turnkey-core-16.1-buster-amd64.ova.
Hopefully this will help others.
Replies (2)
Eric's reply
Reply 1Thanks for posting your workaround Eric.
Reply 2I need to circle back to the OVA build as (as you're likely aware) the latest release (v17.x) is not yet available as VM (zip) or OVA. Thanks for posting your workaround for using the current OVAs Eric.
For what it's worth, personally, if I were creating a new server, unless I had good reason not to, I'd be inclined to install the newer version via ISO rather than the OVA.
Having said that, perhaps you could assist me with the v17.x OVA? I can't promise you a specific timeframe for completion as I have a lot on currently, but if you are ok with v16.x for now, then that might be workable for both of us?
FWIW - the process we use to generate our VM builds (i.e. VM.zip & OVA) is that first we create an empty 20 GB raw disk image. Then, we partition and format it and install turnkey. We then convert the raw imagine into a vmdk and generate a simple vmx file. That is then zipped up as the VM (zip) build. We then use VMware's OVFTool to convert that same vmx and vmdk files into an OVA image. To support a wider range of VMware and other VM software, we do make a few minor tweaks to the ovf file (an xml config file inside the ova).
One thing that would be quite useful for me would be if you could share the vmx file that VMware generated when you imported the OVA and/or the vmx file after you've edited it and it'll working. As we use VMware's own proprietary tool for generating the OVA, I would expect that VMware would unpack that to a usable state! Perhaps we can somewhat reverse engineer it so that OVFTool spits out what we want?! Please feel free to email it/them to me jeremy AT turnkeylinux.org.
Also, whilst I can manually test on a few VMware titles/versions, I don't have access to the breadth that I'd like to support, so VMware user feedback is always warmly welcomed. I can't always accommodate requests, but I do my best to balance the needs and desires of all of our users against the number of hours I have in the day.
Eric replied by email but it wasn't auto-posted to the forums, so I'm manually posting: