Building OVA image

Perform the following steps to build OVA on Ubuntu:

1. Install the packages:

   sudo apt-get -y install bison gawk g++ createrepo python-aptdaemon genisoimage texinfo python-requests libfuse-dev libssl-dev uuid-dev libreadline-dev kpartx git bc
   

2. Get Docker:

   wget -qO- https://get.docker.com/ | sh
   

3. Install pip

   sudo apt install python3-pip
   pip3 install git+https://github.com/vmware/photon-os-installer.git
   git clone https://github.com/vmware/photon.git
   
   
   
   If you encounter an error for LOCALE when you run these commands, then export the following variables in the terminal:
   
   
       export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
   `export LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"`
   

4. Clone the Photon project:

   git clone https://github.com/vmware/photon.git
   

   cd $HOME/workspaces/photon

5. Download latest VDDK from below link:

   https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/downloads/details?downloadGroup=VDDK670&productId=742

6. Search for VMware-ovftool in the same site and install it.

   For example:

   ovftool downloaded file:

   VMware-ovftool-4.3.0-13981069-lin.x86_64.bundle

   Add exec permission and run it as sudo:

   $ chmod +x VMware-ovftool-4.3.0-13981069-lin.x86_64.bundle && sudo ./VMware-ovftool-4.3.0-13981069-lin.x86_64.bundle --eulas-agreed --required

7. For VDDK, if the downloaded file is VMware-vix-disklib-6.7.0-8173251.x86_64.tar.gz, untar the downloaded tarball:

   $ tar xf VMware-vix-disklib-6.7.0-8173251.x86_64.tar.gz

8. Navigate to extracted directory.

• Move the header files to /usr/include

  $ sudo mv include/*.h /usr/include

• Move the shared libs to /usr/lib/vmware $ sudo mkdir -p /usr/lib/vmware && sudo mv lib64/* /usr/lib/vmware && sudo rm /usr/lib/vmware/libstdc++.so*

8. Export /usr/lib/vmware library path(only for current session). Do this step every time you try to build an ova image.

   $ export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/vmware

9. Navigate to your intended Photon source repository and run the following command.

   
   `sudo make image IMG_NAME=ova`
   

10. Make the image for OVA UEFI

sudo make image IMG_NAME=ova_uefi

Result

This command first builds all RPMs corresponding to the SPEC files in your Photon repository and then builds a bootable ISO containing those RPMs.

The RPMs thus built are stored under stage/RPMS/ directory within the repository, using the following directory hierarchy:

$HOME/workspaces/photon/stage/:
├──RPMS/:
    ├──noarch/*.noarch.rpm    [Architecture-independent RPMs]
    ├──x86_64/*.x86_64.rpm    [RPMs built for the x86-64 architecture]
    ├──aarch64/*.aarch64.rpm  [RPMs built for the aarch64 (ARM64) architecture]

The cloud image is created at `$HOME/workspaces/photon.