Uploading Media and Appliances to Catalogs on vCloud Air

So you have a new account on vCloud Air, and now you need to create a VM. Great. But you want to use your own ISO, OVA or OVF, and no such media exists in the public catalogs. So what now?

Enter: ovftool

Whether you're using a Mac or Windows or Linux, you can download OVFTool here.

This is a command-line utility that one can use for a number of things (primarily for creating your own OVA/OVF files), and happens to support uploading into vCA.

The command and parameters to use for uploading files are listed below:

ovftool --sourceType=[SourceType] "[SourceUrl]" "[DestinationUrl]"

Where: [Sourcetype] is replaced with either of the following values:
OVF, N/A, OVA, VMX, VI, vCloud, ISO, FLP, vApprun 

And: [SourceUrl] is the source of your file you wish to upload. This can be a URI or a local path on the machine where you're running ovftool.

And: [DestinationUrl] is replaced with the actual destination on vCloud Air. More this later.

So, to summarize (so far), we have the following Windows (local file) example:

ovftool --sourceType=ISO "C:\Users\UserX\Downloads\RedHat6.iso" "[DestinationUrl]"

Or a Mac (remote file) Example:

"Applications/VMware OVF Tool/ovftool" --sourceType=ISO "http://files.mycloud.com/files/RedHat6.iso" "[DestinationUrl]"

At this stage, we wanted to use a OVA, we would simply replace the sourceType value (ISO) with OVA.

Now, moving forward, we need to build the destination Url. This comprises the following details:

"vcloud://[AccountLogin]:[AcccountPassword]@[vCALocation]?org=[Your Org Guid]&vdc=[Your Virtual Data Center Name]&catalog=[Your Catalog Name]&[MediaType=MediaName]"

The pieces with square braces are to be replaced by their relevant counterparts. An example of a valid format, where I am uploading an ISO called Ubuntu2015.iso to my vCA instance in Virginia, USA, to a Catalog called VirtualNebulaCatalog, on my Virtual Data Center in vCloud Air called VDC1, where my username is joe@blogs.com and my password is secret*01, would be as follows:

"vcloud://joe@bloggs.com:secret*01@us-virginia-1-4.vchs.vmware.com?org=6g23bd9e-d90e-73c9-a761-581343cda2b5&vdc=VDC1&catalog=VirtualNebulaCatalog&media=Ubuntu2015.iso"

Pay special attention to each part. Also important is the end bit in the Url: media=Ubuntu2015.iso

This needs to be replaced with a different value based on the type of source file you are uploading.

So, if you are uploading an OVA, the last bit in the Url would read as follows, instead:

"vcloud://joe@bloggs.com:secret*01@us-virginia-1-4.vchs.vmware.com?org=6g23bd9e-d90e-73c9-a761-581343cda2b5&vdc=VDC1&catalog=VirtualNebulaCatalog&vappTemplate=Ubuntu2015.ova"

A quick search engine hit will reveal additional information in case this article is not enough :-)