VMware Front Experience: The anatomy of the ESXi 5. CD. It is good to know that the PCI ID mapping files are now separated by driver. In ESXi 4. 1 there is a single pci. OEM drivers into the image.
It looks easy now to add a custom driver to the install CD: Just create a tgz- file containing the three files mentioned above, copy it to the ISO root directory and add its name to the two BOOT. CFG files. And yes, this will indeed work for the CD boot! The custom driver will be loaded and you will be able to install ESXi, ..
So, there is more to it.. The image database IMGDB.
ESXi 4.1 Update 1 Installable | 10 February 2011 | 348481 ESXi 4.1 Update 1 Embedded | 10 February 2011 | 348481 VMware Tools | 10 February 2011 | Build 341836. The Mac Mini VMware ESXi 5 Server – Part 2 (Installation) January 10th, 2012 // 10:16 pm @ Paraguin. This is Part 2 of the Mac Mini VMware. About This Book The Installation Guide describes how to install new configurations of VMware® vCenter Server and ESXi Installable. This installation information. VSphere 5.5 is publicly released and it is genrally available to download for public. Ok, what would be the next step? Yes it is to evaluate the features of vSphere 5.
This article provides guidance on the recommended use of Tech Support Mode for VMware ESXi 4.1, ESXi 5.x and ESXi 6.x. For instructions on how to enter Tech Support.
TGZThere is a file named IMGDB. TGZ in the root directory of the CD that is also listed in the BOOT.
CFG files and has the following contents: It contains files that will be unpacked to the directory /var/db/esximg. For each driver (or other software package) an XML- file is created under the vibs sub directory. There are a lot more of these files than shown here (I fiddled the output with ".."), one example is net- e. Let's look into this file: The xml- file contains information about the package including possible dependencies on other packages and a list of all included files. Its file name ("net- e. The list of payloads is the list of included archive files (either of type vgz or tgz), in most cases it's just one. The name of the payload is limited to 8 characters ("net- e.
CD's root directory. The extension of this file is expected to be ".
If there are name conflicts with other packages the number in the extension is counted up. E. g. the payload file for the e.
Then there is the host image profile XML file in the directory /var/db/esximg/profiles. In our example this is the file ESXi- 5. Let's look into this one.. Here we find a list of all vib- packages that make up the currently installed system.
Please note that the vib- id of a package strictly corresponds to the element values that are in the associated vib xml file (see picture before), it is composed the following way: < vendor> _< type> _< name> _< version> So the vib- id element of the net- e. VMware_bootbank_net- e. The payload names that are listed in the image profile file are the same as in the distinct vib xml files with the exception that here the exact file names (e. Conclusion: If we want to add a custom driver to the install CD we need to do the following (in addition to the steps described in section 3.): modify the contents of IMGDB.
TGZ, add a vib xml file for the driver (similar to net- e. There is another particular XML element in both the vib files and image profile file that we need to take care of: the < acceptancelevel>. VMware distinguishes four different acceptance levels: VMware.
Certified, VMware. Accepted, Partner. Supported and Community. Supported, in the XML files they are coded as certified, vmware, partner and community. The names are pretty self- explanatory, and one can easily guess that certified is stricter than vmware that is stricter than partner that in turn is stricter than community. In other words: If the host image profile is of acceptance level certified only packages of the same acceptance level can be part of it. If it is of acceptance level vmware only VMware certified and VMware accepted packages can be installed.
If it is of acceptance level partner (and this is the default!) partner supported packages can be installed in addition to that. The least restrictive level is community that would accept all four types of packages. My expectation is that custom drivers for whitebox hardware are community supported (unless they are published by a hardware vendor company).
However, if the driver's vib file contains the acceptance level community the image profile's acceptance level must also be changed to community. Otherwise the installation of the package will fail.
Can we automate it? Yes, we can! The latest version of ESXi- Customizer does automate all the steps described here to add custom drivers in tgz- format to an ESXi 5. ISO. You only need to feed it with a tgz- file that contains the three files listed in section 3 of this post. Please note: Packages made for earlier ESXi versions will not work with ESXi 5.
And - at the time of this writing - there are probably no oem. ESXi 5. 0! Hopefully, this will soon change. If you are looking for a driver of a device that does not work out- of- the- box with ESXi 5. Unofficial Whitebox HCL at vm- help.