I am still blown away by the diversity of hardware platforms and environments that our customers continue to run their mission critical workloads using ESXi, VMware's Enterprise Type-1 Hypervisor. VMware ESXi is literally deployed in every market segment and vertical that you can imagine and even ones that you may not think of across land ⛰️, air 🛫, sea 🛳️ and even space 🚀.
I still vividly remember back in 2012, when ESXi was able to run on an Apple Mac Mini and how that enabled a new class of use cases for accelerated development and testing of iOS and MacOS applications that was just never possible before. In fact, this also enabled our partners like MacStadium, one of the largest Virtualized MacOS infrastructure provider running on VMware to deliever this offering as-a-service. Most recently, I also learned the popular Github Actions, specifically when using MacOS virtual environments, that it was also leveraging VMware under the hood which is very cool if you ask me!?
Another memorable moment was in 2018, a huge 🎤👊 at our VMworld conference when Ray O'Farrell (former VMware CTO) picked up a tiny device, which we learned was a Raspberry Pi running ESXi and VMware finally introduced to the world our ESXi-Arm initiative.
The ESXi Hypervisor has certainly come a long way from the early days of the VMware Hardware Compatibility (HCL) and VMware continues to expand into new markets and form factors like Data Processing Units (DPUs) as part of the recently announced Project Monterey. Edge computing is another area that is growing extremely rapidly and this recent article featuring our CEO Raghu states that "Edge computing is growing faster than Cloud" which will certainly drive further innovations with our ESXi platform to meet the needs of our customers.
While reminiscing about some of these industry first moments, I was reminded of this tweet back in 2015 where we catch a quick glimpse of the ESXi console in an episode of The Blacklist television show. This was definitely a pretty cool moment for anyone who works in the VMware eco-system! If anyone knows the backstory, I would LOVE to hear about it and how it made it onto the show in case anyone from NBC is reading this blog? 😀
How freaking cool is that!? ESXi 5.1 console spotted in tonight's ep of The Blacklist. Guess they know #1 hypervisor pic.twitter.com/Gcb4rmdiyh
— William Lam (@lamw.bsky.social | @*protected email*) (@lamw) February 2, 2015
While seeing ESXi in a fictional TV series was pretty cool, I thought it might be fun to actually share a couple of recent examples where ESXi was actually running in some pretty unexpected places:
Microsoft Lumnia 950 XL
https://twitter.com/imbushuo/status/1313994956483125248?s=20
Nintendo Switch
https://twitter.com/imbushuo/status/1314487034040311808
Lamborghini
"We have ESXi running in a Lamborghini Huracan as an SD-WAN connected mobile datacenter." (Source: Michael Shuster on 05/20/22)
Cruise Ships, Oil Rigs, Trains, and Airplanes
"Spoke with customers that use it on Cruise Ships, Oil Rigs, Trains, and Airplanes. Some unexpected and interesting places for sure!" (Source: Duncan Epping on 05/21/22)
Soil Truck
"I have spoken to a partner that was using a esxi with vsan environment in these soil research trucks. Living at the edge." (Source: Marco Van Den Hem on 05/22/22)
Valve Steam Deck
"I installed the newest build of ESXi with the USB fling on my 256GB SteamDeck. Pretty much everything just "works"." (Source: Reddit on 05/24/22)
Armored Personal Vehicle
"I did an early Vsan solution for Armored Personal vehicles. A small rack inside the panzer running 3 nodes with no spinning drives due to the vibrations :-D" (Source: Mikael Green on 05/25/222)
Oil Rig Support Vessel
This bad boy. pic.twitter.com/byXEYHFbIF
— James Kilby (@jameskilbynet) May 25, 2022
Real-Time Industrial Control Applications (Manufacturing)
- PLC for controlling the conveyer belt with the sensor
- AI model to identify object (Computer Vision)
- Path identification to calculate the next movement and send the coordinate to the robot arm to move the arm to the object every 2ms
ASUS ROG Ally
So my amazing @ASUS_ROG @ASUS_ROGUK arrived today! So far so good but I couldnt help wonder if @VMware #ESXi would run on it and the answer is yes! Now to add the @vmwflings USB driver and play more,Blog to follow soon 😀
Portable #HomeLab #vExpert #vCommunity #AsusROG #ROGAlly pic.twitter.com/WPuoZp5znl— Gareth Edwards (@GarethEdwards86) June 13, 2023
Have you seen ESXi (x86 or Arm) run in other unexpected places? If so, feel free to share your story by leaving a comment on the blog! Happy Friday
I was the one that installed it on the Steam Deck. It does just "work". I will note that a dock was used for display/ethernet, and the built-in display doesn't work properly. This is probably due to it being a vertical screen, and UEFI doing some weird voodoo.
The fact that it booted, and worked without any tinkering says a lot about the flexibility though. I'd love to see more ARM devices running it, especially with a bit more ram.
Oil rigs , manufacturing , textile , vaccination monitoring all ran esxi
Just "preordered" a rock 5B, with RK3588 (8nm, 8 core) + 16GB ram.
Can't wait to see if I can make ESXi runs , and the performance vs RPi😀
ARM's eco is just getting better