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?
