The following will likely work in other versions of vSphere, but I used it in vSphere 5.5 a while ago, then forgot to hit publish on this post!
In that case I had installed a new ESXi host and not included the custom VIB with the drivers for the SATA card. I did this deliberately as I thought I would have no need at this time to use the local HBA. The thing I forgot is that the host profiles I had created from other hosts included a local HBA, therefore the host profiles would not remediate without one. Annoying! So I used the following steps to manually add the specific VIB I needed (in this case sata-xahci-1.10-1.x86_64.vib).
SSH to your ESXi host (having enabled the SSH server from the vSphere Client):
# ssh root@<hostip> # cd /tmp
Copy the vib file into the host image (in my case I had it stored on my web server, but you could equally use any other standard method to get the file onto the host):
# wget http://www.tekhead.org/wp-uploads/www.tekhead.org/sata-xahci-1.10-1.x86_64.zip
Unzip the vib file:
# unzip sata-xahci-1.10-1.x86_64.zip
Install the vib:
# esxcli software vib install -v file:/tmp/sata-xahci-1.10-1.x86_64.vib Installation Result Message: The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective. Reboot Required: true VIBs Installed: VFrontDe_bootbank_sata-xahci_1.10-1 VIBs Removed: VIBs Skipped:
Check that the vib is installed:
# esxcli software vib list | grep -i <vib name in my case ahci> sata-xahci 1.10-1 VFrontDe CommunitySupported 2014-10-31
Remove the old files (no longer needed):
# rm sata-xahci-1.10-1.x86_64.*
Finally, reboot your ESXi host, job done!