AlmaLinux OS 8.4 on ESXi-Arm

I came across this Reddit thread yesterday, announcing the release of AlmaLinux OS 8.4 for Arm and I knew I had to give it a go on ESXi-Arm!

A great community collaboration. AlmaLinux OS 8.4 for Arm/AArch64 Now Available! https://t.co/umLj1annfD #arm64 #aarch64 #linux #opensource #centos

— AlmaLinux (@AlmaLinux) June 30, 2021

After downloading the ISO, simply create a new Other 4.x Linux VM (1  vCPU/4GB memory) and then boot the ISO to begin the installation. One thing that threw me off the first time I performed the installation was that I forgot to setup networking. It turns out the network interface is actually disabled by default and users must manually toggle the enable button, which I find quite annoying from user experience standpoint. After enabling the networking interface, the rest of the installation went smooth without any issues.

Complete the installation by rebooting and you will now have AlmaLinux OS 8.4 for Arm running on ESXi-Arm 😀

For those interested in setting up Gnome desktop for AlmaLinux, you can follow this tutorial which I used myself.

Note: Thanks to Cyprien, VMware Tools can be installed it looks like an additional repo must be configured by running the following:

dnf config-manager --set-enabled powertools
dnf -y update
dnf install -y git make rpm-build autoconf automake libtool gcc-c++ doxygen fuse-devel gdk-pixbuf2-xlib-devel glib2-devel gtkmm30-devel gtk3-devel libdnet-devel libicu-devel libmspack-devel libtirpc-devel libtool-ltdl-devel libX11-devel libXext-devel libXi-devel libXinerama-devel libXrandr-devel libXrender-devel libXtst-devel openssl-devel pam-devel rpcgen xmlsec1-devel xmlsec1-openssl-devel valgrind-devel libdrm-devel systemd-devel
git clone https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools.git
cd open-vm-tools/open-vm-tools/
autoreconf -i
./configure
make
make install

Next, we need to create a new systemd unit file so that we can manage the VMware Tools service, do to so, run the following command:

cat > /etc/systemd/system/vmtoolsd.service << EOF
[Unit]
Description=
Description=Open VM Tools
After=
After=network-online.target

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/vmtoolsd
Restart=always
RestartSec=1sec

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF

Finally enable and start the VMware Tools service by running the following command:

systemctl enable vmtoolsd.service
systemctl start vmtoolsd.service