OVF

So, I rarely have to work with OVF files and they're a big pain every time I do and there are probably better ways to do this, but here's what I got to work:

C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware OVF Tool>ovftool --network="<network you want to connect the VM to>" -ds=<datastore name> "<full path to appliance>" vi://<user>:<password>@<vcenter fqdn>/?ip=<ip of the host you want to initiate the copy to>

One additional thing I had to overcome was that the appliance was set to be hardware level 9 and I needed this in a v4.1 environment ... and the .mf file has checksums on the .ovf and the .vmdk

Special thanks to me already having a XUBUNTU instance going and to Jon Giffard's Blog for the instruction:

"openssl sha1  <filename>
This will give you the sha1 checksum.  Now edit the MF file and replace the old value with your new one.
vSphere will now deploy your appliance without complaining of a checksum error"

Simple & Easy VMware Thin Client

How about a 38.4MB linux distro with View open client that is simple to set up and works great?

http://repurpose.vmwaredotg.com/tcbuilder/

Go to the build page and put in your criteria and it compiles an ISO for you.

You can burn that to CD, or put it on a thumb drive. [I used UNetbootin in Ubuntu to put it on a thumb drive.]

One gotcha is that, by default, the View client uses the time setting of the client. Since the client, in this case, is the tinycore linux distro that has minimal configuration, you get the timezone of your VM changed to UTC.

You can follow VMware KB 1006773, or edit /boot/isolinux/isolinux.cfg in the ISO or on the thumb drive to add your timezone, i.e.: append initrd=/boot/core.gz quiet cde kmap=de-latin1 cde tz=EST

It gets trickier if want to include DST, but it is doable.

If someone figures out how to get this running on a Raspberry Pi, please let me know.