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VMware Flings Update

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This has been a difficult week for all VMware employees due to the pending acquisition of VMware by Broadcom. Many VMware employees are still waiting to hear back from Broadcom about their employment status either before and/or after the planned acquisition close date. I wanted to provide this context before sharing a quick update regarding the VMware Flings program.

On Tuesday October 24th, VMware Fling authors was made aware that the VMware Flings site (flings.vmware.com) would be taken down and website would simply be redirected to developer.vmware.com/samples starting on Thursday October 26th.

The VMware Flings program was operated and run by VMware's Office of the CTO (OCTO) and while I do not have specifics on why it needed to go down, I tried my best to share out the news as broadly and as quickly as I could so that folks could at least grab what they needed. While the original notice mentioned the site would function up until 10/26 at 5pm PST, it looks VMware IT had already made the DNS changes and the redirect has already been propagated.

As of right now, I do not know the future of the VMware Flings program, but I did want to share a few updates since the site and its downloads are no longer available.

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Will this Arm SoC work with ESXi-Arm?

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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:

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?

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How to install Windows 11 Arm with a vTPM using ESXi-Arm v1.11 

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The ESXi-Arm team has just released v1.11 of the ESXi-Arm Fling and one of the most exciting new capability is that you can now run Windows 11 Arm using an ESXi VM! There is also a TON of new features, so definitely check out the official ESXi-Arm Blog post announcement for more details.

One of the requirements for running Windows 11 Arm is the need for a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Luckily, the latest ESXi-Arm v1.11 also now supports adding a vTPM to a guest and a requirement for setting this is a Key Management Server (KMS). Currently, the ESXi-Arm Fling is based on vSphere 7.0 (GA) and you can either use an existing compatible KMS (which you can look through VMware KMS Compatibility List) or for lab/testing purposes, you can use my KMIP Docker Container, which was also updated recently to support both amd64 and arch64 architecture.

For those interested in quickly setting this up and using my KMIP Docker Container for the KMS component, below is a quick walkthrough on how to set this up.

UPDATE (10/16/23) - vCenter Server may not be needed as you can use ESXi vSphere API to manually add encryption keys for use with vTPM, at least for x86. This same technique might also work with ESXi-Arm, for more information please see this blog post HERE.

Note: While vSphere 7.0 Update 2 introduced an embedded Native Key Provider (NKP) within vCenter Server, it can not be used with ESXi-Arm as both ESXi and vCenter must be running 7.0 Update 2 and the ESXi-Arm Fling is based on 7.0 GA.

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