7zip on ESXi through p7zip

A while ago, I wrote about getting rsync on ESXi: ESXi 5.1 and rsync – damiendebin.net.

Now I needed 7zip on ESXi to make sure I could test unpack some 7zip archives.

This turned out much easier than I thought, thanks to 7Zip for ESXI | Vladimir Lukianov: Заметки who pointed me to the P7ZIP project. P7ZIP actually created three things:

• p7zip (a POSIX 7zip),
• J7ZIP (a Java port of 7zip)
• java_lzma (the Java port of the 7zip lzma SDK which had the first implementation of lzma).

Here are the full steps to get 7zip on ESXi 5.x:

Perform the first 2 steps on a PC or Mac, as ESXi does not support the bz2 compression format. On the other hand, 7zip does not (yet?) support the VMware vmtar compression format.

1. Download a an x86 binary version of p7zip (I took p7zip_9.20.1_x86_linux_bin.tar.bz2 from version 9.20.1, as it corresponds to the 9.20 stable version of 7zip).
2. Unpack and untar this archive recursively.
3. Copy these files to to the /bin directory (or another directory on the path, as /bin gets regenerated at each ESXi reboot): 7z, 7z.so, 7zCon.sfx, 7za, 7zr, Rar29.so (the last one from the Codecs subdirectory).
4. Then logon to your ESXi machine (console or ssh), and set the execute permissions on a selected number of files (.so files do not need their execute bit set):

~ # cd /bin
/bin # ls -al 7z*
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root        562104 Mar 13  2011 7z
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root       2860260 Mar 13  2011 7z.so
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root        486328 Mar 13  2011 7zCon.sfx
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root       1432128 Mar 13  2011 7za
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root        953920 Mar 13  2011 7zr
/bin # chmod 755 7z 7za 7zr

Now there is one little trick: if you run it from the path, it cannot find the 7z.so file: you have to specify the full path.

Look at the difference without the fully qualified path you get the error “Can’t load ‘./7z.dll’ (./7z.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory)“:

/vmfs/volumes/50224895-f616e917-b00b-a0369f0e1091/Raid6SSD/7z # 7z t 0.0.CLEAN-EN-XP-SP3.7z

7-Zip 9.20  Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov  2010-11-18
p7zip Version 9.20 (locale=en_US.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,8 CPUs)
Can't load './7z.dll' (./7z.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or
directory)


Error:
7-Zip cannot find the code that works with archives.

Workaround: use the fully qualified path:

/vmfs/volumes/50224895-f616e917-b00b-a0369f0e1091/Raid6SSD/7z # /bin/7z t 0.0.CL
EAN-EN-XP-SP3.7z

7-Zip 9.20  Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov  2010-11-18
p7zip Version 9.20 (locale=en_US.UTF-8,Utf16=on,HugeFiles=on,8 CPUs)

Processing archive: 0.0.CLEAN-EN-XP-SP3.7z

Testing     ...
Testing     vmware.log

Everything is Ok

Files: 26
Size:       5288863697
Compressed: 2149440556

Now I can do stuff like looping over many 7z files and test them:

for f in *.7z; do echo "Processing $f file.."; /bin/7z t $f; done

vmtar

Just in case the sf forum link gets lost, some information about vmtar:

• Potential vmtar open source.
• vmtar should be in the open source bits of ESXi4 or in the open source bits of ESXi 5.5.

I’m going to try to see if I can get vmtar to compile on x86.

Some examples where vmtar is used are at

• VMware Front Experience: The anatomy of the ESXi 5.0 installation CD – and how to customize it.
• How to Create and Modify vgz (vmtar) Files on ESXi 3.x/4.x | virtuallyGhetto.
• ESXi : Working with tar, vmtar, vmtgz and ramdisks | Virtually everything.

–jeroen