Kyle Gleed, Sr Technical Marketing Manager, VMware
I just learned about the online VIB repository that HP has made available at http://vibsdepot.hp.com.
This is a great resource and I thought I would give a quick overview on how you can access this repository to browse the contents and add the VIBs to your Image Profiles.
Begin by launching a PowerCLI session. Use the “Connect-VIServer” cmdlet to connect to your vCenter Server. Next, import the HP online software depot using the “Add-EsxSoftwareDepot” cmdlet:
With the depot imported, you can use the “Get-EsxSoftwarePackage” cmdlet to list all the VIBs that are included with the software depot:
To get a brief description of each VIB use the “Get-EsxSoftwarePackage” cmdlet with the “| Select Name,Description” filter for the name and description fields:
Next, I'll show how you can create your own image profile that contains one or more of the VIBs from HP’s online depot. As we already have PowerCLI running with HP’s online software depot imported the next step is to import the ESXi 5.0 software depot. If you don’t already have a copy of the offline depot you can download it from here: http://www.vmware.com/downloads.
To import the ESXi 5.0 offline depot Run the “Add-EsxSoftwareDepot” cmdlet specifying the path to the .zip file. Note that the 5.0 software depot comes with two default Image Profiles, one with VMware Tools and one without. I’ll be using the image profile with VMware Tools:
Next create a new image profile using the “New-EsxImageProfile” cmdlet. In the example below I created a new image profile named “MyProfile” by cloning the “ESXi-5.0.0-469512-standard” profile. Note that I chose to specify the Vendor as “HP” and the acceptance level as “PartnerSupported” because I will be adding HP VIBs to my image.
Next, add the HP VIBs to the image profile using the “Add-EsxSoftwarePackage” cmdlet. For this example I will add the “hpnmi” and “char-hpcru” VIBs.
You can verify the VIBs have been added and are now part of the image profile “MyProfile” by using the “Get-EsxImageProfile” cmdlet and expanding the viblist property (I sorted the output to make it easier to find the VIBs):
With the custom image profile created and the HP VIBs added, the next step is to save the image profile. You can save the image as either an offline depot (.zip) or as an ISO image (.iso):
There you have it. You now have a custom ESXi 5.0 image profile that contains VIBs from HP’s online depot. You can use the ISO file to boot your host and install ESXi interactively via the installer or you can use the offline bundle (.zip) to import to Update Manager or use with Auto Deploy.
