How to deploy VSAN 6.2 Witness Virtual Appliance to VMware Fusion 8.1

Since I moved to vSphere 6 U2 I started to plan my VSAN deployment. The problem I have is that there are only two physical servers in my home lab and I have no physical server to host VSAN Witness appliance. I am trying to make it run on my Synology DS415+ (crazy, but seems to be doable), but I need to upgrade RAM on Synology first.

As a temp solution I thought I could run VSAN 6.2 Witness on my Mac. William Lam has already posted a great post on how to Deploy and Run VSAN 6.1 Witness in VMware Workstation/Fusion, but I faced a small issue when following it. 

First it warned me that there is OVF specification and hardware compliance mismatch.  

And after that it failed to proceed with error "Line 821: Unexpected element 'Propery'"

Line 821 referred to the line we have to adjust in Step 3 as per William's guideline. I don't really know whether OVF file for VSAN 6.1 Witness was different or it is a newer version of VMware Fusion that can't parse the OVF file, but here is what I did to make it work. 

Just a small note - all credits for the following procedure go to William Lam. I only adjusted a couple of steps in his procedure to make it work for VSAN 6.2 Virtual Witness Appliance running in VMware Fusion 8.1.

1. Extract content of the OVA file using VMware OVF tool.

/Applications/VMware\ OVF\ Tool/ovftool VMware-VirtualSAN-Witness-6.0.0.update02-3620759.ova VMware-VirtualSAN-Witness-6.0.0.update02-3620759.ovf

2. Create a copy of OVF file in case something goes wrong. It is a quicker option than extracting OVA content again

3. Open OVF (you can even use default textEdit utility) and adjust the appliance size by moving the text marked in Red

<Configuration off:default="true" off:id="normal">

to the following string

<Configuration off:default="true" off:id="tiny">

3. Go to line 821 and delete the following text - marked in the screenshot

Btw, even though textEdit doesn't show line numbers you can still press Cmd+L and type the line number you want to go to. 

You can save and close OVF file now.

4. Create new SHA1 checksum for updated OVF file

openssl sha1 VMware-VirtualSAN-Witness-6.0.0.update02-3620759.ovf

5. Update the OVF file checksum in manifest file

6. Now you can import VSAN 6.2 Witness, but don't press Finish yet.

7. Get to the VM's locations and open the package to get to the .VMX file

8. Open the .VMX file - again, textEdit works just fine, add the following code and replace the password

guestinfo.ovfEnv = "<?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?><Environment xmlns='http://schemas.dmtf.org/ovf/environment/1' xmlns:oe='http://schemas.dmtf.org/ovf/environment/1'><PropertySection><Property oe:key='vsan.witness.root.passwd' oe:value='Password123'/></PropertySection></Environment>"

9. Once you save the file you can run the Witness Appliance.