Terraform vSphere provider 1.x now supports deploying OVA files, makes using ovftool on ESXi hosts obsolete

Mon, 23 Apr 2018 15:54:01 +0000

You may currently have this pipe-line in your CI/CD process that involves running ovftool directly on your ESXi host so as to deploy an OVA appliance directly from it and with as less overhead as possible as in this tutorial on virtuallyGhetto or you could have picked up some tips about running ovftool on ESXi from this article that I wrote some time ago.

However, that is certainly not the best solution for many reasons. For example, if the input is not sanitized in some location(-s) then it becomes trivial to execute any command on the ESXi host. Thus, instead I recommend you to use a tool like Terraform to save your infrastructure as code in a Git repository, for example. With the 1.x version of the Terraform’s vSphere provider you can implement such pipe-line in Terraform as well.

Terraform on Giedrius Statkevičius

Terraform vSphere provider 1.x now supports deploying OVA files, makes using ovftool on ESXi hosts obsolete