Hey guys,

Recently I was deploying some UC applications in customer’s environment and hit quite tricky issue while trying to install CER 11.5 OVA via vSphere 6.5 web client.

At one of the very first steps of VM deployment I got bellow error:

After some research I decided to open OVA as a text file. I found mentioned messages and replaced comas “,” with space. For example, as indicated in error message, in line 159 I replaced “CER_20000,CER_12000” with “CER_20000 CER_12000”.

OVA file before replacement

OVA file after replacement

Alright… Thought it should work, so I run deployment again with my newly corrected OVA, but this time I got following error:

Time for some theory 🙂

OVA (Open Virtual Appliance) is ready to use template which allows us to deploy VM with some predefined values. But OVA as a file usually consists of OVF file (virtual machine metadata), VMDK file/s (virtual disks) , Manifest/Certificate file (file integrity verification).

In our case error says that checksum saved in the manifest file doesn’t match actual checksum of OVF file, which actually makes sense, because if we edited OVA (which again is OVF+Manifest+VMDK), it means that data integrity was violated and hashes might not match anymore.

To solve the issue I needed to extract OVF and Manifest files from OVA. Goal was to calculate new hash of OVF file and save it in Manifest file. I used VMware OVF Tool to do so.

Once all files were extracted, I calculated SHA1 hash of OVF file and saved the value in Manifest file:

After that I again tried to deploy my VM and all worked fine!

Just keep in mind that in case you have OVF+Manifest+VMDKs, instead of single OVA, you will need to upload all of them at the same time into vSphere’s virtual machine deployment wizard.

Thanks for reading!