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Creating a custom VIB for ESXi 8.x

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Back in 2012, a VMware Fling was released called VIB Author, which allowed users to create their own custom vSphere Infrastructure Bundles (VIB) that typically would include configuration changes that was not possible when using the vSphere API such as enabling custom ESXi firewall ports or even bundling up custom utilities that could run within the ESXi Shell.

The VIB Author tool was eventually deprecated and removed due to the lack of support from Engineering, after all, it was released as a Fling. While the need for opening non-standard ESXi firewall port has greatly improved over the years, with the majority of 2nd and 3rd party solutions simply incorporating that into their solution offering, there are still use cases for requiring a custom VIB.

Even with the VIB Author Fling being deprecated, many in the community was still able to construct custom VIBs which were still compatible with later ESXi 5.x to 7.x releases. In fact, I even use the VIB Author to make it easier to distribute and install the popular ghettoVCB solution which can be installed using either a VIB or an Offline Bundle, another format the VIB Author tool supports creating.

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Converting VirtualBox VDI (Virtual Disk Image) to VMDK for use with ESXi 8.x

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If you are converting an Oracle VirtualBox VDI (Virtual Disk Image) to a VMDK for use with VMware ESXi, you might come across the following error:

Unsupported or invalid disk type 2 for 'scsi0:0'. Ensure that the disk has been imported


The invalid disk type 2 is typically a giveaway that the VMDK was mostly likely converted to a format that is only understood by a VMware Type 2 Hypervisor (Fusion/Workstation/Player) rather than ESXi which is a VMware Type 1 bare-metal Hypervisor.

Luckily, there is a straight forward way to convert the existing VMDK into the format that ESXi understands!

Note: While VirtualBox does offer an export appliance option which produces an OVA (Open Virtualization Archive), it fails to properly import into a VMware environment 🙁 and hence the need to work directly with the VDI images.

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Google Coral USB Edge TPU Accelerator on ESXi

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Several weeks back, I came across a really strange post on the VMTN communities asking how to change the Device ID (DID) and Vendor ID (VID) for a USB Device that has been passthrough to a VM from ESXi? The device in question is the Google Coral USB Edge TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) Accelerator, which is a relatively in-expensive device that can help accelerate machine learning (ML) inferencing. With all the buzz these days with Generative AI and ChatGPT, I can only imagine its popularity has grown even further but I did not realize how popular this device has been in the community, especially for those wanting to use it with ESXi.

The initial observation reported by this user and also by many others in the Coral community was that ESXi was showing the incorrect VID/DID for the Coral USB device and because of this, it was not working correctly when passthrough'ed to a VM and they were looking for a way to change the DID/VID value from 1a6e:089a (Global Unichip Corp.) to 18d1:9302 (Google Inc.).

Interestingly enough, a couple of weeks ago, my buddy Alan Renouf had also shared that he recently purchased the Coral USB device, so I figured I would check with him first to see if he was observing the same behavior that was being reported, which he was. I had been going through the Github reports to try better understand the issue and some of the previous workarounds that users had done including disabling the vmkusb module, which I definitely not recommended, especially for more recent releases of ESXi where that will simply disable all USB functionality to your ESXi host.

I still could not wrap my head around the issue as the reports did not make any sense in terms of the DID/VID not being claimed correctly or that it needed to change to properly function. This also did not make sense when speaking with our USB expert (Songtao who also developed our USB Network Native Driver for ESXi), so I decided to bite the bullet and purchase the Coral USB device, which apparently is difficult to obtain unless you overpay on Amazon, which I did.

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