I’ve recently set vCenter Server Appliance up in a nested test environment, so thought I’d run through the process of how to get it up and running in VMware Workstation.
The first thing to do after downloading the OVA package is to grab a copy of the OVFTOOL from the VMware website, specifically: https://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/server/vsphere/automationtools/ovf
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Choose which ever version you need to suit the OS where you will install it:
Once installed we can use the tool to create our .vmx file and extract the .vmdk files from the .ova package. To do so we run the following:
It will take a little while to run, but once complete you should have a vmx file, and the two virtual disk files. Now you can just move them to wherever you store your virtual machines, then open the .vmx file in VMware Workstation, and power on the VM. Once booted, you should get the familiar configuration console:
The default login credentials are username: root and password: vmware