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AlmaLinux OS 8.4 on ESXi-Arm

07.01.2021 by William Lam // 2 Comments

I came across this Reddit thread yesterday, announcing the release of AlmaLinux OS 8.4 for Arm and I knew I had to give it a go on ESXi-Arm!

A great community collaboration. AlmaLinux OS 8.4 for Arm/AArch64 Now Available! https://t.co/umLj1annfD #arm64 #aarch64 #linux #opensource #centos

— AlmaLinux (@AlmaLinux) June 30, 2021

After downloading the ISO, simply create a new Other 4.x Linux VM (1Β  vCPU/4GB memory) and then boot the ISO to begin the installation. One thing that threw me off the first time I performed the installation was that I forgot to setup networking. It turns out the network interface is actually disabled by default and users must manually toggle the enable button, which I find quite annoying from user experience standpoint. After enabling the networking interface, the rest of the installation went smooth without any issues.


Complete the installation by rebooting and you will now have AlmaLinux OS 8.4 for Arm running on ESXi-Arm πŸ˜€


For those interested in setting up Gnome desktop for AlmaLinux, you can follow this tutorial which I used myself.

Note: Thanks to Cyprien, VMware Tools can be installed it looks like an additional repo must be configured by running the following:

dnf config-manager --set-enabled powertools
dnf -y update
dnf install -y git make rpm-build autoconf automake libtool gcc-c++ doxygen fuse-devel gdk-pixbuf2-xlib-devel glib2-devel gtkmm30-devel gtk3-devel libdnet-devel libicu-devel libmspack-devel libtirpc-devel libtool-ltdl-devel libX11-devel libXext-devel libXi-devel libXinerama-devel libXrandr-devel libXrender-devel libXtst-devel openssl-devel pam-devel rpcgen xmlsec1-devel xmlsec1-openssl-devel valgrind-devel libdrm-devel systemd-devel
git clone https://github.com/vmware/open-vm-tools.git
cd open-vm-tools/open-vm-tools/
autoreconf -i
./configure
make
make install

Next, we need to create a new systemd unit file so that we can manage the VMware Tools service, do to so, run the following command:

cat > /etc/systemd/system/vmtoolsd.service << EOF
[Unit]
Description=
Description=Open VM Tools
After=
After=network-online.target

[Service]
ExecStart=
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/vmtoolsd
Restart=always
RestartSec=1sec

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
EOF

Finally enable and start the VMware Tools service by running the following command:

systemctl enable vmtoolsd.service
systemctl start vmtoolsd.service

Categories // ESXi-Arm Tags // AlmaLinux, Arm

Rocky Linux RC1 on ESXi-x86 & ESXi-Arm

05.01.2021 by William Lam // 4 Comments

We're happy to announce Rocky Linux 8.3 Release Candidate 1 is now available! Read more here: https://t.co/92oFcJvjgw #RockyLinux #Linux #Community

— Rocky Linux (@rocky_linux) May 1, 2021

This morning, I saw that Rocky Linux RC1 was now available and includes support for both x86 and AARCH64 (Arm) and I wanted to give it a quick spin on both ESXi-x86 and ESXi-Arm.

ESXi-x86

I was succesful in installing Rocky Linux on ESXi-x86 using the CentOS GuestOS type and using the defaults. You will however need to disable Secure Boot (VM Options->Boot Options) as it is currently not supported.


If you do not, you will see the following error message when booting up the ISO: Verification failed: (0x1A) Security Violation


The default network adapter for this GOS in ESXi-x86 is using VMXNET3 and it was automatically detected. If you forgot to enable networking during the configuration wizard (like I did), you will need to login and edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ens* and change enable=yes and reboot for the changes to go into effect.


VMware Tools can be installed by running the following commands:

yum -y install open-vm-tools
systemctl enable vmtoolsd
systemctl start vmtoolsd

ESXi-Arm

I was succesful in installing Rocky Linux on ESXi-Arm using the CentOS GuestOS type and using the defaults. Networking for ESXi-Arm is using e1000e and if you forgot to enable networking during the configuration wizard (like I did), you will need to login and edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ens* and change enable=yes and reboot for the changes to go into effect.

Unlike Rocky Linux for x86, there is currently not a VMware Tools package that can be installed using yum and my attempts at compiling VMware Tools lead to missing packages that are currently not available in their repository. I have already filed an issue on the VMware Tools Github repo for tracking purposes.

Categories // ESXi, ESXi-Arm Tags // Rocky Linux

VEBA + Knative + k3s on ESXi-Arm

01.26.2021 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

In response to a customer request to add Arm64 support for our VMware Event Router, I have been spending some more time playing with k3s (lightweight Kubernetes distribution for Arm) running on ESXi-Arm using a Raspberry Pi. Not only was this a good learning experience that exposed to me to the broader Arm ecosystem, which is still maturing but it also took me down several πŸ°πŸ•³οΈ which got me exploring new tools that I had never used before such as Buildpacks and Docker buildx to name a few.

This past weekend, I was finally successful in setting up our VMware Event Router for Arm using the Knative processor on a k3s cluster using ESXi-Arm running on a Raspberry Pi 4b 8GB model! As of writing this, the following versions were used:

  • Knative Serving v0.20.0
  • Knative Net Contour v0.20.0
  • Knative Eventing v0.20.1
  • RabbitMQ Cluster Operator v0.5.0

Made some more progress w/@KnativeProject + @VMWEventBroker on k3s on @esxi_arm

βœ… Knative Serving & Eventing
βœ… @RabbitMQ Operator & Eventing
βœ… @projectcontour
βœ… @VMware Event Router

Just need to figure out @buildpacks_io for Arm64 - https://t.co/ChdkMLSXMp looks promising pic.twitter.com/XFWDiGONSB

— William Lam (@lamw) January 24, 2021

In addition, I was able to also convert the Knative python echo function that was originally created by my colleague Michael Gasch and build an Arm64 version of the Knative python echo function which demonstrates the integration of VEBA with the Knative processor connected to a vCenter Server as my event source.

πŸ₯³ Successfully deployed & verified my arm64 python echo func w/@VMWEventBroker (Event Router) using the @KnativeProject processor!

Awesome for lightweight testing/development purposes on small VM w/k3s on @esxi_arm

Heck, don’t even need real vCenter, can run vcsim locally! pic.twitter.com/DuI16fvXfs

— William Lam (@lamw) January 24, 2021

For those interested in just the VMware Event Router Arm64 image, you can access it here and we plan to make that an official image shortly. For those interested in setting up a fully functional Arm deployment of VEBA and Knative processor, you can find the detailed instructions below.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, ESXi-Arm, Kubernetes Tags // Arm, k3s, Knative, Kubernetes, Raspberry Pi, VEBA

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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 technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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