A Daemon's VIB - Part 3 (Building a software package for VMware ESXi)

Part 3: Packaging, SecPolicy and VisorFS

This is the third and last part of the "Daemon's VIB" series about building a software package for ESXi, using the example of the ProFTPD Offline Bundle that I recently released. In the first part I explained how to get (or create yourself) suitable binaries for ESXi, in the second part we cared about the Daemon's configuration, firewall settings and automatic startup. In this last part we will
   a) build and install the actual software package
   b) deal with the VMkernel access security policies and
   c) make the service configurable to adapt to your own needs.

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A Daemon's VIB - Part 2 (Building a software package for VMware ESXi)

Part 2: Service configuration and startup

This is the second part of the "Daemon's VIB" series about building a software package for ESXi, using the example of the ProFTPD Offline Bundle that I recently released. In the first part I explained how to get (or create yourself) suitable binaries for ESXi. In this part I will focus on what is necessary
   a) to make the service start up automatically on system boot and
   b) to make it fully manageable via the vSphere Client.
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A Daemon's VIB: Building a software package for VMware ESXi (Part 1/3)

Part 1: Binaries

I recently released an Offline Bundle for installing the ProFTP Daemon in ESXi 5.x. This was the result of a self-educational project: The subject of this project was not really how to develop software for ESXi, but how to nicely package software for ESXi in a way that makes it easy to distribute and easy to deploy and use for the average VMware administrator. I chose the example of an FTP daemon, because I already stumbled several times over requests for having this available in ESXi, and I know that there were some hacks for it around since the days of ESXi 3.5.

I promised to share what I have learnt in this project, and I will deliver on this promise in three parts. This first part is about binaries and binary compatibility.

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[Update] ESXi5 Community Packaging Tools 2.1

I just published updated versions of my ESXi5 Community Packaging Tools. What's new:

• The TGZ2VIB5 tool now allows to build the VIB payload file from a directory structure (rather than using a pre-packaged tgz file as input)
• You can now change the Acceptance Level of the VIB package

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VMware Labs' latest fling: VIB Author and how it compares to the ESXi5 Community Packaging Tools

The VMware Labs have published a new tool called VIB Author that "allows ESXi administrator to create custom VIBs at the CommunitySupported level". When I read this news my first thought was: Hey, that's exactly what my ESXi5 Community Packaging Tools (ESXi5-CPT, consisting of tgz2vib and vib2zip) are supposed to do! So, how do these two compare?
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[Release] ESXi5 Community Packaging Tools v1.0

I just released the first version of my ESXi5 Community Packaging Tools. These are two scripts:

• tgz2vib5.cmd (to convert a TGZ file to a VIB file, formerly included with ESXi-Customizer)
• vib2zip.cmd (to combine one or more VIB files into an Offline Bundle ZIP)

These scripts can be used by Community developers (who provide e.g. drivers for unsupported Whitebox hardware) to package their software into VMware proprietary formats.

Go, read anything you want to know about these tools (and the different formats that they handle), and download them on the project page.

ESXi-Customizer 2.6 and Tgz2Vib5 1.0

I just published the new version 2.6 of my ESXi-Customizer script.

What's new:

• With this version you are able to optionally create an (U)EFI-bootable ISO file for the installation of ESXi 5.0. (U)EFI stands for (Universal) Extensible Firmware Interface. This is going to replace the current BIOS firmware interface on modern PCs. Please note that the original VMware ESXi 5.0 ISO is already UEFI-capable, the new version of my script is just able to keep this possibility in the customized ISO.
• The new version includes an additional utility script called Tgz2Vib5. With this script you are able to convert an OEM.tgz-style driver package (for ESXi 5.0 only!) into a VIB file. That is the "official" VMware format for software packages - read more about it in this earlier post!

I'd like to encourage the developers of community supported ESXi 5.0 drivers to convert their packages into VIB format (using Tgz2Vib5) before publishing them! The VIB format has several advantages over the traditional OEM.tgz format:

• You can add descriptive meta data (like vendor/author name, version and detailed description) to the driver package
• Unlike an OEM.tgz file a VIB file can be easily installed into an already running ESXi 5.0 system by running the following commands inside a local or remote ESXi shell:
    esxcli software acceptance set --level=CommunitySupported
    esxcli software vib install -v VIB-URL
  (The host must not run any VMs at install time, because it needs to be rebooted after the installation.)
• A VIB file can also be updated with a newer version without having to re-install the whole system. This can be achieved by running the following command inside a local or remote ESXi shell:
    esxcli software vib update -v VIB_URL