Deploying Cisco ISE ova file to VMware ESXi or VMware vCenter

Deploying the OVA for Cisco ISE (or any Cisco product) using vCenter can sometimes cause issues. The best way I’ve ive found is to extract the OVA using 7zip or WinRAR and deploy the extracted OVF using VMware’s cli based OVF tool.

You can do this from MacOS X, Windows or Linux

Once unzipped, bring up a command line and run the commands as follows;

MACBOOK:VMware OVF Tool linevty$ cd /Applications/VMware\ OVF\ Tool/
MACBOOK:VMware OVF Tool linevty$
MACBOOK:VMware OVF Tool linevty$ ./ovftool --noSSLVerify --acceptAllEulas -dm=thin -ds="datastore1" --network=network1 -n=ISE-POV "/Volumes/USB1/Software/Cisco/ISE-TRIAL/ISE-2.4.0.357-virtual-Eval/ISE-2.4.0.357-virtual-Eval.ovf" vi://root:password@192.168.101.11/

This is the command structure broken down;

./ovftool - The actual program
--noSSLVerify - disable SSL checking
--acceptAllEulas. - accept the EULA
-dm=thin. - ensure the disk is thin provisioned
-ds="datastore1" - the name of the datastore you want to deploy to
--network=network1 - the name of the network you want to deploy to
-n=ISE-POV - the name you want to give your VM
"/Volumes/USB1/ISE-2.4/ISE-2.4.0.357-virtual-Eval.ovf". - the location of the OVF file
vi://root:password@192.168.101.11/ - the login details for your ESXi Host