I am very happy to share that the ESXi-Arm team has just released a brand new version of the popular ESXi-Arm Fling (v2.0), which is now based on ESXi 8.x codebase and specifically using the latest ESXi-x86 8.0 Update 3b release! This is a very exciting update, as the original release of the ESXi-Arm Fling (released 4 years ago this month) has been based on the ESXi 7.x codebase for its initial port from x86 to Arm.
After delivering the initial productization of ESXi-Arm with the release of vSphere Distributed Service Engine (vDSE), formally known as Project Monterey, the ESXi-Arm team has been hard at work to converge the ESXi-Arm codebase, which is also used powers our vDSE technology!
In addition to porting the ESXi-Arm codebase from 7.x to 8.x, the team continues to support a large variety of Arm-based systems, which you can see from the list below:
- Ampere Computing Altra and AltraMax-based servers (Single Processor system like the HPE ProLiant RL300 Gen 11 or Dual Processor system like Ampere 2U Mt. Collins)
- NXP LayerScape 2160A-based SolidRun HoneyComb LX2K mini-ITX platform.
- Raspberry Pi 4B (8GB only)
- Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB only)
- Rockchip RK3566-based PINE64 Quartz64 Model A and SOQuartz compute module
- Rockchip RK3566-based Firefly ROC-RK3566-PC and StationPC Station M2
We look forward to hearing about your experiences with our 16th release of the ESXi-Arm Fling and I hear the ESXi-Arm team has added a special easter egg 🐣 ... curious if someone will find it? 🤔
For anyone upgrading from Fling v1.x, there is a small manual update to the VM configuration files. Make sure to read chapter 3 "Upgrading from Fling v1" of the ESXi documentation. To download the latest ESXi-Arm ISO/Offline Bundle along with all the updated ESXi-Arm documentation, use your free or sign-up for a Broadcom Community login and hope over to the VMware Flings portal.
As with the v.8 version writing all time on the drive and removing the usb support, so is this version just destroy any micro SD card fit on the board after few days of used ? I guess it is only good for doing a demo or quick test and not for real usage. Or have a 30-40 sd card in backup ready to swap...
Use iscsi?
Where is the v8 ISO for ARM64 seems v2.0 of the fling still ships as with VMware-VMvisor-Installer-7.0.0-22949429.aarch64.iso and then you need to upgrade to 8?
I was seeing the same thing, but just checked again and the v2.0 zip file now contains the 8.0 ISO
How does licensing work on this new version? With the previous one we were using perpetual 7 ENT+ keys.
Same as before, no change. See https://williamlam.com/2020/12/esxi-arm-licensing-options.html for more details
What do you use a hypervisor with 8GB or RAM and 4 cores for?
I use that for a router.
My development rigs start at 256GB of RAM and 24 cores and this is kind of small.
Not sure I even understand what you’re saying or asking … 🤔
Well you shared the news about releasing ESXi for raspberry Pi that has at most 4 core CPU and 8GB of RAM. My question was about what is that ESX running on such a tiny computer used for?
> My development rigs start at 256GB of RAM and 24 cores and this is kind of small.
Good for you I guess.
Running Gitlab Instance with serveral runners on a RPi Cluster building RISCV and ARM64 Docker Images as one example.
However otherwise don't feed the troll not understanding what a R&D Fling is for.
rPI is just one of MANY Arm-based platforms and I didn't mention anything specific but I think you're assuming Arm = rPI .... In any case, there's multitude of use cases even for rPI (See https://williamlam.com/2020/10/using-esxi-arm-fling-as-a-lightweight-vsphere-automation-environment-for-powercli-and-terraform.html). I do a lot of work w/ESXi as that is what I support at VMware, so having a lightweight ESXi endpoint (since the underlying API is exactly the same for x86/Arm can be extremely useful as shared in referenced article). While you can still run couple of Linux-base Arm VMs on rPI (post-installing ESXi-Arm), for more workloads, you'll want to look at more capable platform w/more resources which spans beyond enthusiast hardware like rPI to Edge & Datacenter Server grade systems, again the list of platform is listed
How about 128 cores and up to 4 TB of memory?
https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813140135
After upgrade to 8.0, all my guests dhcp lookup failed. Is there any hint to enlight me please?
It turns out that the 3rd party UEFI of my board has a bug for a long time. Nothing with ESXi 8.0.
I'm glad to hear! I was at a complete loss about what could have caused that. Even a bug in UEFI surprises me, but it's good if everything works now.
Hi,
I know this is not in-topic question but I have to ask, can vSphere/vCenter perpetual licences be mixed with subscriptions in the same vCenter? I have a VCF subs waiting to be applied and I'm not sure if I can just plop them into vCenter.
Is it possible to run this nested in Fusion on an ARM based Mac?
Give it a try 😃
Wait... so it took a year to add Pi 5 support, then didn't actually get the NIC working. Nuts to this.
Is there version of VMware workstation that will work on arm?
No
What are the benefits against ESXi7?
Hello William,
From Fling 2.0, we are no more able to install RHEL 8 :
EFI Stub : ERROR : This 64KB granular kernel is not supported by your CPU
Are you aware about it ? Thank you,
Nicolas FERRIEUX
Hi Nicolas,
16 KB and 64KB granule support was disabled because some virtual devices don't support them correctly.
We are adding an unsupported vmx config option on the next fling v2 update to be able to run your VM.
Cyprien
Hello Cyprien,
Many thanks for your answer. Any idea about the release date ?
Nicolas
today? 🙂
see https://community.broadcom.com/vmware-cloud-foundation/viewdocument/esxi-arm-fling-21-refresh?CommunityKey=b75c6afd-0c0c-4f39-89a4-018ed3a892d3
Thank you !
Good job ! It's working !
Hello,
Thank you for this good article!
After upgrading from the latest 7 to the latest 8 ESXi ARM version (using the Offline Depot ZIP file), after connecting to the UI I still see on the "Profil Image" the version installed as : (Updated) ESXi-7.0.0-22949429-standard (VMware, Inc.)
Is this normal? Even though I know the update was successful by the look of the UI which is completely different.
Thank you!
Do you think ARM Fling will be compatible with NSX at any time? I would love to add it to my NSX.
Thanks for your interests in ESXi-Arm w/NSX, I know we've had some requests, so will definitely share this with Engr team. Curious what your use case was for ESXi-Arm + NSX? If you can share your scenario and how you intend to use it, it would be helpful.
Today, even if you could override, it wouldn't work because NSX Manager will push NSX specific VIBS to ESXi host, which would obviously fail as they're for x86 and so we would need to provide NSX-Arm VIBs for that process to go through and allow successful host prep.
Again, happy to share this with Engr team and this could be possibly enhancement in a future update of ESXi-Arm Fling, if you can help with the scenario and features you'd be interested in using.
Hi William,
Any plan to release a 8.0 u3e based version of the Fling ?
Would be nice with a version supporting the main new feature of u3e 🙂
What specific features are you looking for?
Maybe this one form the release notes:
Broadcom makes available the VMware vSphere Hypervisor version 8, an entry-level hypervisor. No Broadcom support is available for this offering and it is for non-production use. vSphere Hypervisor cannot connect to vCenter and therefore cannot be centrally managed. You can remotely manage individual vSphere Hypervisor hosts by using the VMware Host Client. vSphere Hypervisor supports a maximum of 8 virtual CPUs per virtual machine. You can download it free of charge from the Broadcom Support portal
That’s not a feature … and a Fling is not a product, so it wouldn’t apply technically anyhow