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You are here: Home / ESXi-Arm / Will this Arm SoC work with ESXi-Arm?

Will this Arm SoC work with ESXi-Arm?

06.02.2023 by William Lam // 4 Comments

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:
    • SolidRun Honeycomb LX2
    • SolidRun MacchiatoBin or CN9132 EVB
    • NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier Developer Kit (experimental)
  • Far Edge:
    • Raspberry Pi 4b - 4GB or 8GB Model
    • Raspberry Pi 400
    • NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX Developer Kit (experimental)
    • LS1046A-based NXP Freeway
    • LS1046A-based NXP RDB
    • Socionext SynQuacer Developerbox
    • PINE64 Quartz64 Model A
    • Firefly Station M2 (4GB and 8GB models)

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:
    • Conclusive Engineering WHLE-LS1

Rockchip RK3588/RK3588S

  • ESXi-Arm Compatible: No
  • Example Kits:
    • Orange Pi 5
    • Orange Pi 5b
    • Orange Pi 5 Plus (07/21/23 - Yes)
    • Radxa Rock 5b
    • Nano Pi R6C
    • Nano Pi R6S
    • NanoPC-T8
    • Liontron RK3588

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:
    • Pine64 Quartz64 Model A
    • Pine64 SOQuartz
    • Firefly ROC-RK3566-PC
    • Firefly ROC-RK3568-PC
    • StationPC Station M2
    • StationPC Station P2
    • Radxa Rock 3 Compute Module

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8CX

  • ESXi-Arm Compatible: No
  • Example Kits:
    • Microsoft Windows Dev Kit 2023

Apple Silicon

  • ESXi-Arm Compatible: No
  • Example Kits:
    • Apple MacBook Air
    • Apple MacBook Pro
    • Apple iMac
    • Apple Mac Mini
    • Apple Mac Studio
    • Apple Mac Pro

NVIDIA Jetson AGX

  • ESXi-Arm Compatible: Yes
  • Example Kits:
    • Jetson AGX Orin 64GB
    • Jetson AGX Orin Industrial
    • Forer DSBOX-AGX
    • SeeedStudio reServer J5014

More from my site

  • How to install PowerCLI 13.0 and use new Image Builder & Auto Deploy cmdlets on Apple Silicon?
  • How to install Windows 11 Arm with a vTPM using ESXi-Arm v1.11 
  • ESXi running in unexpected places ...
  • 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

Categories // ESXi-Arm Tags // Arm

Comments

  1. Justin says

    06/02/2023 at 9:29 am

    I am probably not alone in wanting to see ESXi for the Apple Silicon Mac mini or the Studio.

    Reply
  2. Daniel Casota says

    06/02/2023 at 11:50 am

    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.

    Reply
  3. Rémy says

    07/22/2023 at 5:11 pm

    Hi, I cannot find the "Orange pi 5b plus" on OrangePi's website. Maybe it is the "Orange pi 5 Plus" ?

    Reply
    • William Lam says

      07/23/2023 at 7:16 am

      Yes, I had a typo. Its the Orange Pi 5 Plus (as you can see in the ESXi screenshot)

      Reply

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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, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC) across Private, Hybrid and Public Cloud

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