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Comment: added note re virtualbox and ext4

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Remember to set the name you like, the datastore you want and point it at the server you want to deploy to

VirtualBox

VirtualBox will import directly from an OVF file so you can just fire up VirtualBox and select "Import Appliance..."

Browse to where you unzipped the file and select the ovf file

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If you have any trouble the VirtualBox documentation is here: https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch01.html#ovf

Important Note regarding Ext4: if your virtualbox host is Linux and your VMs are stored on XFS or Ext4 file systems, then it is absolutely necessary that you enable the "Host I/O Cache" for all virtual disk controllers after importing the OVF file, or you run the risk of file system corruption in your guest. On one of our test systems (Linux kernel 3.14.23, Virtualbox 4.3.14) the VM wouldn't even fully get through the first boot before the virtual disks got corrupted - but with Host I/O Cache on everything is fine.

Other Hypervisors

To use OVF files with other virtualisation systems like KVM you may have to convert the OVF file to a native format; Two well-known tools for this purpose are virt-v2v (available in CentOS6/RHEL) and virt-convert (in Debian).

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