Adding Third Party Drivers To A VMware vSphere/ESXi 5 Installation ISO

Stolen from http://alexander.walden.de/2012/01/18/making-your-own-esxi-5-installation-image/

The SSD I purchased as the only disk in my new server isn't recognized by the vSphere installation CD. I need to add a driver from the vendor in order to do the installation.

1. Download and install VMware vSphere PowerCLI on a Windows 7 machine
   • Run it as an administrator
   • The first time you start it, run

     Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned

2. Download the VMware vSphere offline bundle
3. To add the offline bundle as the depot, run

   Add-EsxSoftwareDepot c:\temp\VMware-ESXi-5.1.0-799733-depot.zip

4. Download the driver. In this case I’ve downloaded the driver for the OCZ Revodrive 3:

   ocz10xx-1.0.0-offline_bundle-751505.zip

5. Place this driver file in a location accessible to your PowerCLI window.
6. To add the “offline bundle” packages to the depot, run

   Add-EsxSoftwareDepot c:\temp\ocz10xx-1.0.0-offline_bundle-751505.zip (remember to adjust the path to your environment!)

7. To check the software packages for a specific vendor, run

   Get-EsxSoftwarePackage -Vendor ocz*

8. To show all software packages in the depot, run

   Get-EsxSoftwarePackage

9. Next we will select a valid ESXi 5 image profile and create a clone that we will then enhance. Run Get-EsxImageProfile to get a list of all available profiles. For this example, I’m selecting ESXi-5.1.0-799733-standard as that is the latest at the time of writing. To create a clone of this profile run

   New-EsxImageProfile -CloneProfile ESXi-5.1.0-799733-standard -Name ESXi-5.1.0-799733-Custom.

   Obviously feel free to adjust the name of the image as required

   OPTIONAL: You may need to change the Acceptance Level of your image depending on which drivers you want to inject by running

   Set-EsxImageProfile -ImageProfile ESXi-5.1.0-799733-Custom -AcceptanceLevel CommunitySupported

10. To get the list of VIBs in your profile, run

    (Get-EsxImageProfile -Name ESXi-5.1.0-799733-Custom).VibList

11. Now add the driver to your profile by running

    Add-EsxSoftwarePackage -ImageProfile ESXi-5.1.0-799733-custom -SoftwarePackage scsi-ocz10xx

12. Now export your custom ISO:

    Export-EsxImageProfile -ImageProfile ESXi-5.1.0-799733-Custom -ExportToISO -FilePath "c:\temp\ESXi-5.1.0-799733-Custom.iso"

13. If you want to save a custom depot zip file, run

    Export-EsxImageProfile -ImageProfile ESXi-5.1.0-799733-Custom -ExportToBundle -FilePath "c:\temp\ESXi-5.1.0-799733-Custom.zip"

14. To compare the original to your profile, run

    Compare-EsxImageProfile ESXi-5.1.0-799733-standard ESXi-5.1.0-799733-Custom

15. And just in case you want to remove a package:

    Remove-EsxSoftwarePackage -ImageProfile ESXi-5.1.0-799733-Custom -SoftwarePackage scsi-ocz10xx