How to install vib files in ESXi

At some stage while in contact with VMware support, they may give you drivers to try. These drivers will be in VIB (vSphere Installation Bundle) format and will look something like vmware-esx-drivers-net-bnx2x-400.1.52.12.v40.4-1.0.4.00000.x86_64.vib. I don’t know why this is not documented anywhere in the official docs, but here’s how to install these driver bundles into ESXi.

  1. scp the file to the ESXi server
  2. Run “esxupdate -b <filename>.vib –nosigcheck –nodeps update”.
  3. Run “esxupdate query –vib-view” to confirm that the driver bundle is installed. You may need to reboot for the driver to take effect.

If you are fiddling with different driver revisions, you may need to remove a later version if you want to rollback to a previous version, otherwise ESXi won’t let you reinstall an older bundle. To remove a driver bundle use the following command:

esxupdate -b <driver bundle name> remove

You can get the driver bundle name by running “esxupdate query –vib-view”.

4 thoughts on “How to install vib files in ESXi”

    1. Think of SCP as being similar in functionality to FTP (it actually shares more similarities to SSH but lets not add to the acronym hell here). You install an SCP client like WinSCP, then punch in the IP address of your ESX server with the username “root” and the password you setup when installing ESX. Once you’ve logged in it’s a simple matter of dragging and dropping the file onto the server.
      Let me know if you need more help with this.

    2. Or install the putty suite into your Windows path. It becomes Putty SCP, so ‘pscp ‘
      It has some quirks. Whenever referencing a *nix host, put a colon at the end of the path: ‘pscp c:\file.txt user@hostname:’

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