This command exports one or more virtual machines from VirtualBox into a virtual appliance in OVF format, including copying their virtual disk images to compressed VMDK. See Section 1.14, “Importing and exporting virtual machines” for an introduction to appliances.
The export command is simple to
use: list the machine (or the machines) that you would like to export to
the same OVF file and specify the target OVF file after an additional
--output or
-o option. Note that the directory of the
target OVF file will also receive the exported disk images in the
compressed VMDK format (regardless of the original format) and should have
enough disk space left for them.
Beside a simple export of a given virtual machine, you can append
several product information to the appliance file. Use
--product,
--producturl,
--vendor,
--vendorurl,
--version and
--description to specify this additional
information. For legal reasons you may add a license text or the content
of a license file by using the --eula and
--eulafile option respectively. As with
OVF import, you must use the --vsys X
option to direct the previously mentioned options to the correct virtual
machine.
For virtualization products which aren't fully compatible with the
OVF standard 1.0 you can enable a OVF 0.9 legacy mode with the
--legacy09 option. Other options are
--ovf09, --ovf10, --ovf20.
To specify options controlling the exact content of the appliance
file, you can use --options to request the
creation of a manifest file (encouraged, allows detection of corrupted
appliances on import), the additional export of DVD images, and the
exclusion of MAC addresses. You can specify a list of options, e.g.
--options manifest,nomacs. For details,
check the help output of VBoxManage export.