The number of Arm-based hardware kits has grown significantly in the last couple of years. Today, there are many more options to choose from including different form factors and even hardware from some of the more traditional x86 vendors, which also demonstrates the market opportunity and the demand for Arm-based workloads.
Running ESXi-Arm is definitely a great way to bring all the benefits of the VMware ESXi Hypervisor to your Arm-based workloads including leveraging the powerful vSphere platform by connecting that to an x86 vCenter Server.
As of this publishing this blog post (06/01/23), ESXi-Arm supports over a dozen different hardware platforms that spans Datacenter, Near Edge and Far Edge:
- Datacenter:
- Ampere Computing eMAG-based systems from Avantek and Lenovo (HR330A, HR350A)
- Ampere Computing Altra-based systems from Avantek and other distributors (experimental, single socket only)
- Ampere Computing Altra-based shapes from Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (experimental)
- Arm Neoverse N1 System Development Platform
- HPE ProLiant RL300 Gen11 (experimental)
- Marvell OCTEON 10 (experimental)
- Near Edge:
- Far Edge:
If you want to use ESXi-Arm, which is completely free, we definitely recommend looking at this list of Arm hardware kits and you can always find the latest supported Arm-based hardware under the ESXi-Arm Requirements section.
With that said, we continue to see new Arm-based kits and SoCs that are being released on a regular basis and question that I typically see get asked from our customers and field is will this work with ESXi-Arm?
Unfortunately, the answer is not always straight forward and can depend on a number of factors including support for Armv8, Exception Level 2 (EL2) and UEFI+ACPI tables but even with UEFI support, there may still be board specific code that is still required before ESXi-Arm can properly boot. Ideally, in addition to meeting the requirements above, the Arm kit/SoC is also Arm SystemReady certified which would ensure the highest possibility that ESXi-Arm would properly boot and run.
Furthermore, just like ESXi-x86, we also need device drivers (network/storage) for the onboard devices or else you may need to resort to using USB-based networking and/or storage to be able to run workloads beyond just installing and running ESXi-Arm.
To help our users navigate beyond the officially supported Arm-based hardware kits listed HERE, I have put together a small list of some of the most commonly asked Arm kits/SoCs that I am aware of and worked with our ESXi-Arm team to confirm whether these would work with ESXi-Arm. This is not an exhaustive list by any means and if you have a particular kit you are interested to know whether ESXi-Arm would work or not, feel free to leave a comment below.
NXP Layerscape LS1026A/LS1048A/LS1088A
- ESXi-Arm Compatible: Maybe - ESXi-Arm should install fine, however there are no drivers for the onboard network adapter and a USB-based NIC would be required to properly function.
- Example Kits:
Rockchip RK3588/RK3588S
- ESXi-Arm Compatible: No
- Example Kits:
Rockchip RK3566/RK3568
- ESXi-Arm Compatible: Yes - Requires the Community Quartz64 UEFI firmware (please download the Pine64 instructions for more details) and at least 4GB of memory (ideally 8GB memory)
- Example Kits:
Qualcomm Snapdragon 8CX
- ESXi-Arm Compatible: No
- Example Kits:
Apple Silicon
- ESXi-Arm Compatible: No
- Example Kits:
NVIDIA Jetson AGX
- ESXi-Arm Compatible: Yes
- Example Kits:
I am probably not alone in wanting to see ESXi for the Apple Silicon Mac mini or the Studio.
Autonomous tractors, mobile robots, telemedicine setop boxes, digitized chem labs, machining centers, etc. all these vendors face the same hardware iteration speed issue. So the glasses will stay. There is tremendous promise for change in the industry. VMware solves this equation better and earlier than its competitors by adding a robust (edge) hardware abstraction layer. Thanks William for the curated compilation! Great as always.
It would be nice to introduce ( = support & subscription !) ESXi on Arm, the sooner the better.
Hi, I cannot find the "Orange pi 5b plus" on OrangePi's website. Maybe it is the "Orange pi 5 Plus" ?
Yes, I had a typo. Its the Orange Pi 5 Plus (as you can see in the ESXi screenshot)