Extract text from OVF files
To convert your OVF file to another format, you need VMware_Workstation or other System software.
To convert other file formats to the "Virtual Appliance Descriptor" file type, you need software like VMware_Workstation or a similar tool.
The .OVF (Open Virtualization Format) is the industry standard for packaging and distributing virtual appliances, maintained by the DMTF. While its open nature allows interoperability between platforms like VMware Workstation, Oracle VirtualBox, and Red Hat Virtualization, the format itself presents significant friction for end-users. An .OVF file is merely an XML descriptor; it does not contain the actual disk data. It must be accompanied by large disk images (typically VMDK) and a manifest file (secondary files) in the same directory to function. Moving an .OVF often leads to broken paths or missing disk files.
To solve portability issues, users typically convert the .OVF (and its loose dependencies) into a single OVA archive, which packages everything into one file for easier distribution. For execution, hypervisors often "convert" the OVF import into their native configuration formats, such as VMX for VMware or VBOX for VirtualBox. If you are dealing with scientific data, your file might be a Micromagnetic Simulation Vector Field used by the OOMMF Project, which requires specialized scientific visualization tools rather than virtualization software.
Convert.Guru analyzes your OVF file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted OVA, VMDK, SH, ODT, ODG, PDF, 7Z, TXT, ISO, ZIP, VDI, VBOX and QCOW2 files.
If you want to convert OVF file to OVA, QCOW2, VMDK, VHD, ISO, VHDX, CSV, JSON, XML, YAML, YML or TOML, you can use VMware_Workstation or similar software from the "Virtual Machine Configuration" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert DBF, XML, SQLITE, XLSX, SQL, TSV, ACCDB, YAML, MDB, CSV, ODS or JSON files to OVF, try VMware_Workstation or another comparable tool in the "Virtual Machine Configuration" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our OVF converter.