OVA Full Form,what is full form of OVA

OVA Full Form


Introduction

A file with the OVA file extension is most likely an Open Virtual Application file or “OVA”, sometimes called an Open Virtual Application File or an Open Virtualization Format Archive File. They are used by virtualization programs to store various files associated with a virtual machine (VM).


The file is stored in the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) as a (TAR) archive. Some of the files you might find within it include disk images (like VMDKs), an OVF descripted XML-based text file, ISOs or other resource files, certificate files, and an MF manifest file.


Since the OVA format is a standard, it can be used by a virtual machine program to export the VM data files so that it can be imported into a different application. Virtual box, for example, can export one of its VMs to an archive package with the. OVA file extension that includes an OVF and VMDK file.


Open an OVA File

VMware Workstation and Virtual Box are two virtualization applications that can open OVA files. Some other similar programs that can support OVF include VMware’s, OVF Tool, HCL SmartCloud, Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager, and Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). Since OVA files are archives that hold other data, you can extract the contents out or browse through them with a file unzip program like 7-Zip.


Convert OVA Files

There’s little reason to convert an actual OVA file but several reasons why you might want to convert one or more files from inside the achieve. Keep that in mind when you are deciding what format you want to virtual machine to end up as. For example, you don’t need to convert an OVA file to OVF or VMDK in order to get those files out of the archive. You can instead just extract it from the OVA file using one of the file unzip programs mentioned above.

The same is true if you want to convert the VMDK file to Hyper-V VHD; you can’t just convert the OVA archive to VHD, instead you need to pull the VMDK file out of it and convert the VMDK to VHD using a program like Microsoft Virtual Machine Converter (that tool has been retired, but you can still get it through that link, which goes to 2020 archive of the program).

To convert an OVA file to be used with VMware Workstation is as easy as exporting the VM to an OVA file. Then, in VMware, use the File> open menu to browse for the OVA file, and then follow the instructions on the screen to set up
the new VM.


You might also be looking for an OVA to ISO converter but it had be more appropriate to convert the virtual hard drive files (that are inside the OVA archive) to an image format (much like the VHD example above), which is out of the scope of this article.