Downgrade VMware OVA Hardware Version

VMware OVA's have a minimum hardware version associated with them and if you’re ESXi/vShere/vCenter’s hardware version is too old, the OVA will not deploy and run. Following this process, you can downgrade the hardware requirement for the OVA. If the hardware requirement is arbitrarily set, then the VM should run without issue, but if there is a dependency issue that requires the hardware version, then you will probably run into issues.

Download or move the OVA to a Linux machine. In the example the OVA is named <virtual appliance>.ova.

tar -xvf <virtual appliance>.ova 
sudo nano <virtual appliance>.ovf 

find and replace the line: 

<vssd:VirtualSystemType>vmx-14</vssd:VirtualSystemType> 

With: 

<vssd:VirtualSystemType>vmx-10</vssd:VirtualSystemType> 

rm <virtual appliance>.nvram 
rm <virtual appliance>.mf 
rm <virtual appliance>.ova 

Create the new OVA: 

tar -cvf <virtual appliance>.ova <virtual appliance>.ovf <virtual appliance>.vmdk <virtual appliance>.cert

Deploy the new OVA.