What is an OVA File

Before defining an OVA File, we need to understand another Format which is OVF:

Open Virtualization Format (OVF) is an open standard for packaging and distributing virtual appliances. It englobes the software to be run in virtual machines.

An OVF package consists of several files placed in one directory. An OVF package always contains:

• One OVF descriptor (a file with extension .ovf): The OVF descriptor is an XML file that describes the packaged virtual machine, it contains the metadata for the OVF package, such as name, hardware requirements, references to the other files in the OVF package, and human-readable descriptions.
• One or more disk images, some example of disk image files may include: VHD (file format), VDI (file format), VMDK, QCOW.
• Optionally certificate files and other auxiliary files.
• Optionally Manifests Files.

The entire directory can be distributed as an Open Virtual Appliance (OVA) package, which is a tar archive file with the OVF directory inside.

In simple words, the OVA file is the container of the OVF package. An OVA file is a virtual appliance used by virtualization applications such as VMware Workstation and Oracle VM Virtualbox.

OVF/OVA format is a standard, it can be used by all virtualization tools vendors like VMware and VirtualBox, etc.

How to open OVA Files

On MAC, Windows, and Linux OS, VMware Workstation and VirtualBox are two popular virtualization applications that could be used to open OVA files.

Other virtualization applications that can open OVA files:

• VMware’s OVF Tool
• HCL SmartCloud
• Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM)
• Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Also, OVA file components can be accessed via extractor tools like zip7.

One of the advantages of Deploying an OVF or OVA template is that it will allow you to add pre-configured virtual machines to your Virtualisation Application (VMware or VirtualBox etc).

Concatenate OVA Files on Windows 10

Step 1: You should put all OVA files parts that you want to merge into another OVA file inside a single directory (folder).

Step 2: Open Windows 10 command line cmd prompt:

Step 3: Navigate to the folder path which you placed all ova file parts in using the command “cd” like below:

cd Path_of_ova_file

Example:

cd C:\Users\Learndutys\myovas\

Step 4: Concatenate the OVA files parts using the “type” command (installed by default on Windows 10):

Basic “type” Syntax is “type” then all the names of ova files parts separated by space then “>” symbol and name of merged ova file that will be created, here an example:

type  file1.ova  file2.ova  file3.ova > final_file.ova

Concatenate OVA Files on Linux

Step 1: You also have to place all your OVA files parts that you need to concatenate into another OVA file inside a single repository.

Step 2: Open Linux CLI Terminal

Step 3: Navigate to the repository path which you placed all ova file parts in using the command “cd” :

cd /etc/ova_files


Step 4: Concatenate the OVA files parts using the “cat” command (installed by default on almost all Linux distributions kernels):

cat file1.ova file2.ova file3.ova > file.ova