ESXi-Arm V2 Easter Egg

A new version of the ESXi-Arm Fling (V2) was recently released and the major update to the ESXi-Arm V2 Fling is that it is now based on the latest ESXi 8.x codebase, which is currently 8.0 Update 3b. In my blog post, I had hinted there was a small easter egg 🐣 the Engineering team had included in the ESXi-Arm Fling update, which I did not know about until they had mentioned it!

Since no one has officially found the easter egg, I figured it might be time to break the silence and share as I think it can actually benefit some users based on their usage of ESXi, especially from a testing and/or learning perspective such as playing with the vSphere API as just one example.

To be fair, I also did not try too hard to hide the easter egg, it was actually in plain sight in screenshot on my blog post, do you see it now? 😉

In case you still do not see it, you can now run an instance of ESXi-Arm V2 inside of a VM, better known as Nested ESXi-Arm! At VMware Explore US, I actually had a use for Nested ESXi-Arm, since I have an Apple M1 and I needed to run a demo for my Tech Deep Dive: Automating VMware ESXi Installation at Scale session, which was focused on ESXi Kickstart and since both ESXi-x86 and ESXi-Arm share the exact same implementation, the ability to run Nested ESXi-Arm came in handy, but I was using an unreleased version that was not related to the Fling itself. The same benefit can also apply if you want to spin up a few ESXi-Arm VM for exploring the vSphere API and connect the Nested ESXi-Arm to an x86 vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), maybe you are doing some development with Ansible or Terraform, there are definitely a number of use cases this can enable for those with such a need.

Arm Hardware

Just like creating a Nested ESXi-x86 VM, simply select Other & then choose VMware ESXi 8.0 or later and configure with at least 2 vCPU and 8GB of memory.

Note: The current version of ESXi-Arm does NOT currently support VMware Hardware-Assisted Virtualization (VHV), which is required to power on 64-Bit GuestOSes for Nested or inner-VMs. If you enable this setting, you will not be able to power on the Nested ESXi-Arm VM, so you will need to ensure this CPU setting is disabled (which it is the default behavior).

VMware Fusion (M1 or later)

Even more impressive, for those with an Apple Silicon systems (M1 or later), you can also run Nested ESXi-Arm VM! Simply select Other & then choose Other 64-bit Arm and configure with at least 2 vCPU and 8GB of memory. This is very useful, in fact I had a need for this during VMware Explore US as I was demo'ing something that was no Arm specific and I had asked the Engineering team for an internal build of ESXi-Arm that could run on the my Apple M1, so I am very happy to see this ESXi-Arm capability now available to the community!

Note: Since Nested-ESXi-Arm requires promiscuous mode to function, when powering on the VM in VMware Fusion for installation, you may find it annoying that are prompted for the administrator password. If you wish to disable the prompt, take a look at this blog post for more details.