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You are here: Home / ESXi-Arm / ESXi on Arm Fling is LIVE!

ESXi on Arm Fling is LIVE!

10.06.2020 by William Lam // 17 Comments


The highly anticipated ESXi on Arm Fling has just been announced and is NOW generally available as a new VMware Fling! Head over to https://flings.vmware.com/esxi-arm-edition and be sure to carefully read through the Requirements and documentation before try out the bits.

History

Although ESXi-Arm was publicly demo'ed at VMworld Europe 2018 during the closing keynote by Ray O'Farrell (former CTO of VMware), the reality was there was a ton more to do before ESXi-Arm could be a reality for VMware customers. The newly formed ESXi-Arm team at VMware has been hard at work these last couple of years working with both Arm and its eco-system in extending hardware standards, firmware standards (open contribution to UEFI), and certification beyond the existing Arm server ecosystem, which enabled us to support platforms like SmartNICs and the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi. This is just a glimpse into what it took to get where we are at today.

I am also excited to share that the Virtually Speaking Podcast crew has invited us back for an exclusive episode featuring both Andrei Warkentin and myself to dive deeper into the development of ESXi-Arm project at VMware. This is an episode you will not want to miss!

Hardware

The ESXi-Arm Fling supports a number of different Arm platforms ranging from a traditional Datacenter form-factor to both Near and Far Edge systems including the highly requested Raspberry Pi (rPI)! With the rPI, only the 4b model will be supported and although both the 4GB and 8GB memory model works with ESXi-Arm. We highly recommend folks invest in the 8GB model to be able to take advantage of more vSphere features and be able to run more workloads.


For a complete list of supported Arm hardware platforms, please refer to the Requirements section of the Fling website. If there are other platforms you would like to see get added, do not hesitate to either leave a comment here and/or post directly on the ESXi-Arm Fling page.

vCenter Support

For customers with an existing x86 vCenter Server or those that would like to deploy a new vCenter Server, you will be able to attach and manage ESXi-Arm hosts just like you normally would as long as you are using vCenter Server 7.0 or greater.


We expect the majority of vSphere platform features to "just work" like vMotion but there may be some features that may not work or have additional requirements.


For example, to enable vSphere HA and/or vSphere FT, the Fault Domain Manager (FDM) Client VIB must be installed on an ESXi-Arm host. Today, this VIB is distributed as part of vCenter Server and only x86 version of the client is available. We do provide FDM Client VIBs for ESXi-Arm as part of the ESXi-Arm Fling, but support will be limited to vCenter Server 7.0c and 7.0d. For detailed instructions, please refer to the ESXi-Arm documentation.

VMware Tools

VMware Tools for ESXi-Arm GuestOS is not bundled as part of ESXi-Arm Fling, but can be installed. To do so, you will need to compile open-vm-tools for your respective GuestOS. Instructions can be found in the ESXi-Arm Fling documentation and below, you can see a screenshot of VMware Tools for Arm successfully running on Ubuntu 20.04 GuestOS running on ESXi-Arm on the rPI 4.

vSAN Witness

Lastly, a popular use case that has been brought up when ESXi-Arm was initially demo'ed was the use of the rPI as an inexpensive vSAN Witness, which is a fantastic use case for ROBO & Edge locations. I am very happy to share that using an rPI 8GB as a vSAN Witness works! As you can see from the screenshot below, I have two physical Intel NUC 9th Pro configured in a 2-Node vSAN Cluster and I am using the rPI as vSAN Witness 😀


In case this was not clear, this is NOT officially supported but it does demonstrate the viability of this concept and and feedback from the our users would help drive the priority and the potential support for such a configuration. More details will be shared in a future blog post outlining the instructions on using rPI as vSAN Witness. Stay tuned!

As you can see, this is just a small taste of what can be done with the ESXi-Arm Fling and the possibilities are truly endless! The ESXi-Arm team is very excited to see what the community will do with the ESXi-Arm Fling, what type of use cases are you solving or workloads that you are running. Below are a few ways in how you can engage with the ESXi-Arm team and community.

ESXi-Arm Engagement

  • For general questions/issues, please leave a Comment and/or file Bug on the ESXi-Arm Fling site
  • Follow ESXi-Arm on Twitter: @esxi_arm
  • Follow the official ESXi-Arm Blog: https://blogs.vmware.com/arm
  • Chat with the ESXi-Arm team and community on Slack: #esxi-arm-fling on VMware {code}
  • For other inquiries or engaging with ESXi on ARM Product Team, you can send an email to esxionarm [at] vmware [dot] com

More from my site

  • vSAN Witness using Raspberry Pi 4 & ESXi-Arm Fling
  • Cluster API BYOH Provider on Photon OS (Arm) with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) and ESXi-Arm
  • Hybrid (x86 and Arm) Kubernetes clusters using Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) and ESXi-Arm
  • Stateless ESXi-Arm with Raspberry Pi
  • My Raspberry Pi 4 BOM for ESXi-Arm Fling

Categories // ESXi-Arm, VSAN, vSphere Tags // Arm, esxi, Raspberry Pi, witness

Comments

  1. Daniel Edwards says

    10/06/2020 at 8:26 am

    Still not RTAV support for a View Client running on Pi I assume...

    Reply
  2. JohnG says

    10/06/2020 at 9:31 pm

    Have you tried to run a full vsan cluster with multiple rpi's yet?

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      10/07/2020 at 7:20 am

      I don't have 3 x rPI, but I know other team members have tried this setup and it works just like vSAN Witness.

      Reply
  3. Jan says

    10/07/2020 at 6:54 am

    Hello,
    Quick question. Do you need new license if you are already using vcenter 7?
    Thank you

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      10/07/2020 at 7:21 am

      No, by default ESXi-Arm Fling has 180 day evaluation (normal eval is 60 days). So you'll be able to attach to an existing vCenter Server 7.x or greater for that period. If you wish to use a valid vSphere 7.x licenses to prolong the 180 days, you're more than welcome to or you would have to reinstall

      Reply
  4. F4bian says

    10/08/2020 at 8:48 am

    It's possible to test K8s in vSphere with the raspberry pi and this fling?

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      10/08/2020 at 9:16 am

      No, vSphere w/Tanzu isn't supported mainly as all the VMs which get deployed are x86 and there are no Arm-equiv. I will be doing a blog post on how to play w/K8s on ESXi-Arm but it will not be the vSphere w/Tanzu or Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) solutions

      Reply
  5. Tommy Nevers says

    10/11/2020 at 6:40 am

    Windows 10 ARM64 work? If so, any anything close to usable performance for basic tasks?

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      10/11/2020 at 2:53 pm

      No, Windows 10 Arm isn't currently supported.

      Reply
  6. Thomas says

    10/15/2020 at 4:32 pm

    Any word on vCenter HA witness on esxi arm? My initial concern is the storage requirements.

    Reply
  7. Richard Hughes says

    10/23/2020 at 1:52 pm

    Can you give a URL for the FDM VIB? I do not see it on the ARM Fling page. 🙁

    Reply
  8. Loke says

    12/07/2020 at 8:46 pm

    Hi. What kind of Windows is supported on this system? I have tried x64 (copied vm to server) and Arm64 (bootable cd). None succeeded.

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      12/07/2020 at 8:50 pm

      Windows on Arm is currently not supported

      Reply
      • Loke says

        12/07/2020 at 8:51 pm

        Then why does it list those Systems? What systems are actually supported?

        Reply
        • William Lam says

          12/07/2020 at 9:23 pm

          Sorry, which list are you referring to? Can you provide a link as the only list of supported Arm GuestOS is in the ESXi-Arm docs.

          Reply
          • Brantley says

            02/07/2021 at 7:06 pm

            Hey William! Any idea on when Windows on arm might have support on esxi-arm?

          • William Lam says

            02/07/2021 at 9:27 pm

            No

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Author

William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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