We're happy to announce Rocky Linux 8.3 Release Candidate 1 is now available! Read more here: https://t.co/92oFcJvjgw #RockyLinux #Linux #Community
— Rocky Linux (@rocky_linux) May 1, 2021
This morning, I saw that Rocky Linux RC1 was now available and includes support for both x86 and AARCH64 (Arm) and I wanted to give it a quick spin on both ESXi-x86 and ESXi-Arm.
ESXi-x86
I was succesful in installing Rocky Linux on ESXi-x86 using the CentOS GuestOS type and using the defaults. You will however need to disable Secure Boot (VM Options->Boot Options) as it is currently not supported.
If you do not, you will see the following error message when booting up the ISO: Verification failed: (0x1A) Security Violation
The default network adapter for this GOS in ESXi-x86 is using VMXNET3 and it was automatically detected. If you forgot to enable networking during the configuration wizard (like I did), you will need to login and edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ens* and change enable=yes and reboot for the changes to go into effect.
VMware Tools can be installed by running the following commands:
yum -y install open-vm-tools
systemctl enable vmtoolsd
systemctl start vmtoolsd
ESXi-Arm
I was succesful in installing Rocky Linux on ESXi-Arm using the CentOS GuestOS type and using the defaults. Networking for ESXi-Arm is using e1000e and if you forgot to enable networking during the configuration wizard (like I did), you will need to login and edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ens* and change enable=yes and reboot for the changes to go into effect.
Unlike Rocky Linux for x86, there is currently not a VMware Tools package that can be installed using yum and my attempts at compiling VMware Tools lead to missing packages that are currently not available in their repository. I have already filed an issue on the VMware Tools Github repo for tracking purposes.
Hi William,
Guest customizations are failing for Rocky Linux 8.3 RC1 in ESXi 6.7. I filed a bug report at https://bugs.rockylinux.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30 (the pull request at https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools/pull/513 looks promising).
Thanks in advance for any help that you may be able to offer.
Awesome write up, thank you for testing and covering us!
Hi William, great writeup. I think you may have a typo in the service name, should be vmtoolsd instead of vmtoolsds
Yes, good catch. Just fixed