A couple of weeks ago I was asked to import a Puppet learning OVA in ESX. Sounded pretty easy… But it wasn’t…

When I started the import I got an error:

Issues detected with selected template. Details: – 47:7:VALUE_ILLEGAL: Value “PIIX4” of ResourceSubType element not found in []. -56:7:VALUE_ILLEGAL: Value “PIIX4” of ResourceSubType
element not found in [].  -65:7:VALUE_ILLEGAL: Value “3” of Parent element does not refer to a ref of type DiskControllerReference

Hmm, something went wrong. But what?

The first step I took was opening the OVA (with 7Zip) and have a closer look at the OVF that was inside. Details about what you see inside an OVF is explained here: https://blogs.vmware.com/vapp/2009/11/virtual-hardware-in-ovf-part-1.html

The error was that value 3 is not a valid reference to a disk controller. And indeed, the blog revealed that 6 was the resource type for a SCSI controller. With this information I editted the OVF file:

<Item>
<rasd:Address>0</rasd:Address><rasd:Caption>scsiController0</rasd:Caption>
<rasd:Description>SCSI Controller</rasd:Description><rasd:ElementName>scsiController0</rasd:ElementName><rasd:InstanceID>3</rasd:InstanceID><rasd:ResourceSubType>lsilogicsas</rasd:ResourceSubType><rasd:ResourceType>6</rasd:ResourceType>
</Item>

<Item>
<rasd:Address>1</rasd:Address><rasd:Caption>scsiController1</rasd:Caption>
<rasd:Description>SCSI Controller</rasd:Description><rasd:ElementName>scsiController1</rasd:ElementName><rasd:InstanceID>4</rasd:InstanceID><rasd:ResourceSubType>lsilogicsas</rasd:ResourceSubType><rasd:ResourceType>6</rasd:ResourceType>
</Item>

And after saving the file I could import the OVF.

The reason for this “error” is that the OVA is not meant for ESX but for VMware Workstation