I’m currently trying to figure out how to install additional software on ESXi. This is a bit of a tough one for now.

My findings are as follows:

• There are two vmfs file systems which contain a set of .tgz files. The contents are identical, but with the hash sums do not match
• One of these file system trees contain a checksum.md5 file. The other does not – I suppose that the one with the checksums is what ESXi considers as being the “original” files.
• When I replaced /lib/libc.so.6 on the server, it immediately dropped all my ssh sessions, and denied access to the console. Once I power cycled the server, all the changes I made to the userland and base of the OS were reverted (I’m guessing they came from the “recovery” file system)
• ESXi complains if the libraries in use do not have a VMWARE_SOMETHING version string (And thus the previously described scenario occurs)
• Most of the userland consists of busybox and dropbear sshd. There’s also gpg.

I’m not big on building software, the usage of gcc, or anything related to linux for that matter, so help from some linux guru on this matter would be greatly appreciated.