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Considerations for future vSphere Homelabs due to upcoming removal of SD card/USB support for ESXi

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In case you have not heard the news, VMware had recently published a new knowledge base article (KB 85685) outlining details for the future removal of SD card/USB as a standalone boot device for ESXi.

If you have not read the KB, please take a few minutes and carefully read the article, especially as you think about future hardware upgrades and purchases.

There has certainly been no shortage of discussions and debates since the publishing of the VMware KB. One topic that I know many of you have been wondering and asking about is what is the impact to vSphere Homelabs? This was something that had already crossed my mind after I first read the KB and I was thinking about this a bit more this week and specifically some of the potential options that are available to customers right now but also some of the considerations you may want to account for in with future homelab upgrades.

Disclaimer: These are my own personal opinions and do not reflect any official guidance or recommendations from VMware.

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Victron Venus OS on ESXi-Arm

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Over the weekend I received an interesting inquiry from a customer who had been playing with the ESXi-Arm Fling and wanted to know if it could run Victron Venus OS? I had never heard of Venus OS before, but a quick search online lead me to the company called Victron Energy which produces and sells various types of electrical chargers and they also have their own operating system to manage their software called Venus OS:

Venus OS is the software running on our Cerbo GX monitoring system, as well as its predecessors the Color Control GX, Venus GX and more. Also, it is in the GX versions of our MultiPlus-II  and EasySolar-II inverter/chargers.


Venus OS can be installed on a Raspberry Pi (rPI) and the customer attempted to run it as a VM using ESXi-Arm on rPI using the techniques shared here and here but found that it was unable to boot with a message stating no kernel installed.

Given this was beyond my skillset, I pinged Cyprien, who works on ESXi-Arm at VMware to see if he had any ideas? In less than 30 minutes, he not only found out the reason the previous techniques could not be used but also came up with a quick workaround. Venus OS is a 32-bit OS and is not based on Debian and this is why you can not simply boot using the Debian Installer. The solution requires a custom Arm64 linux kernel that includes UEFI support to be built and installed to be able to boot Venus OS running as a VM on ESXi-Arm. For more information, please see the detailed instructions below and big thanks to Cyprien for his help over the weekend!

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AlmaLinux OS 8.4 on ESXi-Arm

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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!

After downloading the ISO, simply create a new Other 4.x Linux VM (1  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 😀


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