Technical Paper - Creating a vSphere Update Manager Depot

A vSphere Installation Bundle (VIB) is a single software package that may contain drivers, CIM providers, VMkernel modules, or otili her software. A depot is a repository of VIBs available online to Update Manager users. You create and maintain a depot to control the VIB files that Update Manager users can access. The depot and Web service portal use a static Web site to deliver a set of files intended for consumption by Update Manager. Before you provide updates to users through a depot, use the Workbench-based developer kit or the VIB Suite to generate the following files:

• A vendor-index.xml file. The index lists the product ID and version number, and points to metadata.zip files.
• One or more metadata.zip files. The metadata.zip files point to the location of the VIB files. Names of metadata.zip files cannot conflict with other filenames within your set of files or with the files of other vendors.
• One or more bulletins describing the VIB file. A bulletin is an XML file that describes the VIB included in a consumable package, metadata.zip. At least one bulletin must be included in every metadata.zip file.
• One or more VIB files.
  

From the vendor depot, Update Manager downloads a list of supported vendor Web site URLs. Based on the list of URLs, Update Manager obtains a list of metadata URLs from the publishing Web site, where it downloads the metadata. The metadata, in turn, contains the URLs for the VIB files. You can create the files required for an update depot by using VIB tools that are part of VMware Workbench. To create an online depot, unzip the contents of an offline bundle created by Workbench to the Web server root directory.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vsphere-50-update-manager-depot.pdf