A few weeks back, I had a request from one of our Technical Adoption Managers (TAM) that their customer wanted to create a custom ESXi VIB that could be used with vSphere Lifecycle Manager (vLCM) and would only require the ESXi host to reboot as part of the remediation.
This might sound like a strange request but I suspect the customer was either building out some automation for vLCM or simply getting more hands on with vLCM without applying any changes, which is great because its predecessor, vSphere Update Manager (VUM) will be removed in a future major release of vSphere.
While the customer was able to create a custom VIB by following the instructions in my recent blog post for building a custom VIB for ESXi 8.x, I did noticed that their descriptor.xml did not properly set the live-install-allowed and live-remove-allowed options which controls whether an ESXi host should reboot after installing and removing a VIB from the host respectively.
Since vLCM only works with offline bundles, we actually need to create an offline bundle with our custom ESXi VIB that vLCM can import. To further complicate things, starting with vSphere 7.x, a proper offline bundle that can be imported into vLCM requires the use of components rather than bulletins, which is what VUM previously had used.
With the assistance of the vLCM Engineering team, I was able to create my own "Dummy" ESXi VIB/Offline Bundle that is compatible with both vSphere 7.x and 8.x, which can be used directly by a standalone ESXi host via ESXCLI or imported and lifecycle using vLCM.
Step 1 - Either download the pre-built offline bundle from the Github repo OR follow the instructions to build your own.
Step 2 - Ensure the ESXi software acceptance level is configured with Community Support since the custom VIB would not be signed. You can do so by following the instructions HERE using either the vSphere UI or ESXCLI.
Step 3 - Use the vSphere UI to import the offline bundle by navigating to Lifecycle Manager->Actions and then clicking on the Import Updates operation.
Step 4 - Create or edit a vSphere Cluster that is managed by a vLCM Image by navigating to Update->Image->Edit and then click on the Add Components operation to select the ESXi reboot component and then click save.
Step 5 - Lastly, apply the remediation to the vSphere Cluster and a reboot will be required after the ESXi component has been installed on the host as demonstrated in the screenshot below.
Thanks for the comment!