Fails on unsupported disk type cdrom although -cdrom was not on commandline

[evought]

Attempting to export a Windows 11 virtual machine to ova, I get this:

$ ~/go/bin/ovf-export -id blahblahblah --output win11 -ova
2025/04/04 14:16:47 unsupported disk type: cdrom

I have not requested it to export cdroms with -cdrom.

The cdrom is defined as follows in the virsh xml dump:

Perhaps a "-no-cdrom" option to explicitly bypass them?

There is a separate issue even on removing the cdrom entry (and for good measure, the shared folder entry):

2025/04/04 14:42:51 can't create OVA: exit status 2

with no additional information that I can find. The win11 directory appears to be populated with the .ovf and .vmdk files. There is a .mf file in the output directory... ok, a manifest file with hash entries for the .ovf and .vmdk. The generated .vmdk file appears reasonable to qemu-img info and is the correct size. The .ovf file appears to be XML and looks to have contents that looks reasonable. I have not tested the import yet, but it may be that only the .ova creation failed. There is a .ova file in the working directory with the proper header information for a tar archive (according to 'file win11.ova'), but it is only about 10K (the image is 128 GB, of which 26 GB is allocated).

My goal here is to move and import into Oracle Virtual Box, and I may be able to accomplish that with the ovf and vmdk, but I thought I would report the problem.

I can create a second entry for this failure if you wish, and add other information to it to help you diagnose. I was hoping that you might know what an "exit status 2" indicated to tell me where to look. (Disclosure: I am familiar with Linux (30 years), xml and have basic virsh knowledge, but am NOT familiar with Go in the slightest).

I am running this on Fedora Linux 41 using the stock golang.x86_64 1.23.7-1.fc41 package. I installed Go just for this purpose and have not changed its configuration in any way beyond "go install gitlab.com/Enrico204/ovf-export/cmd/ovf-export@latest". There is plenty of disk space.

And, BTW, thank you for the tool.

[Enrico204]

Thank you for reporting the issue! The error is generated here:

ovf-export/ovf/ova/generate.go

Line 50 in 02f09ad

return fmt.Errorf("can't create OVA: %w", err)

That function creates the OVA from the OVF and other files. The exit status comes directly from tar, but unfortunately the output is discarded there -- the codebase is old and not well written, I would rewrite if I had some time :-)

Later today or tomorrow, I should be able to modify the code to expose the error. You can use the exported files (importing the OVF directly). In the meantime, can you create a second issue for this? So that we can track the two problems independently.

On the cdrom issue, I think I can fix that as well, but I would need an example (it seems it was removed when you submitted the issue). Can you attach an example/anonymized XML?

[vinodagel]

Interesting in this issue if can bee fixed

[exu-g]

I also had this same issue (both of them actually)
The second issue with "Can't create OVA" could be related to the naming of the VM disk.
Mine was exported as "win11_en-5-clone-2.software-successful", my latest snapshot being named "software-successful".
Using tar manually (see below) to create an OVA didn't import properly into XCP-ng with Xen Orchestra.

The solution was to add the ".vmdk" file ending and edit the relevant entry in the .ovf (<File ovf:href=...) to point to the new name.

Tar command to create the OVA manually: tar -cvf win11_en-CLONE.ova win11_en-CLONE.ovf win11_en-5-clone-2.software-successful.vmdk win11_en-CLONE.mf