Error: Failed to deploy OVF package: File ds:///*_deviceImage-0.iso was not found

This killer error would be enough to eat your productive time. Going through the forums does help you to fix this but the following are to be noted:

1. OVA files are tar archive files with a .vmdk, .mf and .ovf files inside it.
2. The files inside the OVA archives should be in specific order.

Here is what I had tried with no success:

1. Unzipping the content, editing the respective files, zipping it again in .zip format and renaming to .ova. Used winrar tool for this. This may throw error "header not found".
2. Using 7zip to extract the files, edit the required files and drag-drop updated files to 7zip. Just because 7zip utility changes the order of files in the archive, it gave error ".ovf file not found in the beginning of archive."

Solution:

Following steps are executed on a Linux machine. You may use tools such as cygwin to perform them on Windows.

1. Rename the .ova file to .tar: mv myovafile.ova myovafile.tar
2. List the .tar file to note down the order of its contents: tar -tf myovafile.tar
3. Extract the tar archive: tar -xvf myovafile.tar
4. Edit the .ovf file using text editor to have vmware.cdrom.remotepassthrough as rasd:ResourceSubType content for the rasd:ElementName with CD-ROM DVD value. You may refer VMware KB document.
5. Calculate SHA1 for the .ovf file: sha1sum myovafile.ovf
6. Update the SHA1 value to the .mf file using a text editor.
7. Create tar file with the updated files. Pass files in the order they was displayed when step 2 was performed: tar -cvf mynewova.tar {fileslist_separated_by_space}
8. Rename the file to have OVA extension: mv mynewova.tar mynewova.ova