Quick Fix for “The task was canceled by a user” when deploying OVA in vCenter 6

So I came across a very odd vCenter bug today when trying to deploy an OVA file on vSphere 6.0, specifically the latest CoreOS image.

The import was repeatedly failing with the same error message.

What was more frustrating was the fact that the error message was “The task was cancelled by a user”, which it blatantly was not!

Error log example below:

OVA Import Errors

A quick bit of testing and Googling and I came across an article by my good friend Ather Beg from the LonVMUG, who had a very simple fix for the same issue in vSphere 5.5.

1. Install 7-zip or a similar archiving tool
2. Extract the OVA file using 7-zip into its component parts
3. Import into vCenter, selecting the OVF file for the import target

That’s it – simples!

Success!

What’s really weird is that after importing the OVF successfully, I then went back and imported the OVA, and it worked fine!

Very strange indeed…