Summary
The VIB Author tool allows ESXi administrator to create custom VIBs at the Community Supported level. VIB stands for vSphere Installation Bundle and is a way of packaging programs that run on ESXi hosts. The custom VIBs can then be used in house, or made available to a wider audience.
Key Features
- Create VIBs using custom VIB descriptor files and custom payload files
- Sign and verify a VIB
- Extract and display VIB information
- Publish the VIB as an offline depot ZIP file
For more information about VIBs:
VIB Author is Community Supported, meaning that the VIB has not gone through testing and approval by VMware or by VMware partners and, as such, may cause performance or stability problems and have security vulnerabilities.
System Requirements
The RPM package can be installed on SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 SP2.
It has the following dependencies:
Python == 2.6
Coreutils >= 6.9
binutils >= 2.17.50
tar >= 1.20
bash >= 3.2
grep >= 2.5
file >= 4.19
sed >= 4.1.5
gzip >= 1.3.5
openssl >= 0.9.8i
zlib >= 1.2.3
python-lxml >= 2.1.2
python-urlgrabber >= 3.9.1
Instructions
See "Customizing VIBs with VIB Author" (vibauthor.pdf)
Video
Change Log
Engineers
 | Yong DingWorks in the Management Strategy group. |
Hello. Nowadays my company is VMware Elite Partner. How could I sign vib (created with “vib author”) such as Partner Supported?
Great Fling! Thanks for providing this tool. For others that may try using this. Take extra care to make sure the descriptor.xml file is correct. I had some errors when trying to modify and use the sample descriptor-template.xml file. I had better success modifying the example from http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2012/09/creating-custom-vibs-for-esxi-50-51.html.
As long as a VIB is a renamed Debian archive and an XML file, I don’t really see the point/need of any VIB authoring tool – maybe releasing the proper format of the XML would be enough.
Great stuff … but such a tool has already been around for a while: Check out my ESXi5 Community Packaging Tools! If you ever have the need to author your own VIB file and/or Offline bundle then I suggest that you try both the VIB author and my tool …
- Andreas