Making new firewalls permanent in 5.1?

[paulehoffman]

Greetings. There are some great instructions on how to turn on VNC access for VMs at:

https://www.trouter.co.uk/wp/?p=933

Those instructions work fine for 5.1... until the hypervisor is rebooted. At that point, the new file that was added has disappeared, and so the rule disappears.

How does one add firewall rules in 5.1 and make them permanent?

[marcelo_soares]

You will need to change the oem.tgz config file.... where all the configurations are stored. I don't know if this works with 5.x,you can google a little bit to check solutions like this. I remember this blog post regard storing the ssh config file on ESXi 4.0:

http://plone.lucidsolutions.co.nz/linux/vmware/esxi/enabling-ssh-with-public-key-authentication-on-v...

[paulehoffman]

Is "changing the oem.tgz" file at all supported? I could find nothing about it in the documentation or KB articles. All the blog posts and so on that mention it are quite old.

It seems quite odd that there are KB articles about how to change .vmx files to do something like VNC, but not how to make that something be useful after reboot. Maybe this is all covered in some other part of 5.1?

[lamw]

To persist the Firewall configuration as well as other configurations, you can create your own VIB using the Vib Author fling. Take a look at this article http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2012/09/creating-custom-vibs-for-esxi-50-51.html which provides an example for Firewall rules