2013: Another year of blogging and tooling

The end of 2013 is near! Time to look back on this year's achievements, blog posts, HowTos and tools ... Here is my annual review, my list of highlights - in case you missed any of them ;-)

Announcing the V-Front Online Depot for ESXi software

A while ago Google announced that their Google Code service will no longer allow downloads to be hosted. Existing projects will no longer be able to create new downloads starting at January 15th 2014. So far I have made all my tools and ESXi software packages available on my Google Code page, so it's time to think about other ways to distribute my stuff.

What is the preferred way to distribute software for VMware ESXi? How does VMware do this? They use a so-called Online Depot! VSphere Update Manager makes use of this, and you can also access the VMware Online Depot using PowerCLI ImageBuilder, e.g. to build a customized ESXi installation ISO. Basically an Online Depot is just a web site (accessible via the http[s] protocol) that has a well defined directory structure and some XML configuration files to glue it all together.

And you can build your own Online Depot! HP (and other hardware vendors) did this to distribute their CIM providers and tools for ESXi. So did I, and this post is about how to use the brand new V-Front Online Depot for ESXi software.