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Automated network scripted installation of ESXi-Arm without SD Card

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A topic that I have been working on even before the release of the ESXi-Arm Fling is the ability to perform a network scripted installation (Kickstart) of ESXi-Arm for the Raspberry Pi (rPI) but doing so without the need of an SD Card plugged into the rPI itself. The latter point is critical as today, the SD Card is used to house the required UEFI files to allow the rPI to boot the ESXi-Arm installation files which can be served from a local USB device or remotely over the network using HTTP, NFS or even iSCSI boot, which Andrei had recently blogged about.

Running through the SD Card preparation is not a difficult process and if you only have a single ESXi-Arm host, this may not be all that interesting other than learning about how this works and setting up a basic Kickstart environment. However, if you have several rPI and maybe you do not have spare SD Card and you prefer to make it easy to deploy additional ESXi-Arm host, this is a pretty cool solution. The precursor to this work was actually from a blog post I had published a few weeks ago on copying the rPI UEFI files and booting ESXi-Arm off of a USB device.

Once I figured out how that worked, it was simply figuring out the automation required during the %post section of a scripted installation of ESXi-Arm to pull down a copy of the UEFI files which is then copied onto the first partition of the USB device and thus allowing you to completely boot off of the USB device after installation. This took some trial and error playing around with mcopy which is a tool I have written about to help copy files to and from a USB device using the ESXi Shell. The other trick that we are taking advantage of here is that the USB device that you intend to use are mostly the same from a UEFI point of view and by disabling all other boot option, we ensure that after the UEFI files are copied over to ESXi-Arm host, it will boot from USB device rather than over the network.

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Packer reference for PhotonOS Arm NFS Virtual Appliance using OVF properties for ESXi-Arm

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In case the title was not descriptive enough, I was curious if I could build an Arm Virtual Appliance (OVA) using OVF properties that would allow for all sorts of interesting guest customizations which I have blogged about before here, here, here and here using x86 PhotonOS as a reference implementation. My idea for this actually pre-dated the release of the ESXi on Arm Fling, but it was only until recently with support for VMware Tools for Photon OS Arm, was I able to finally piece together this solution.

It was also neat to see that I could build an Arm OVA using x86 tooling (Packer and OVFTool) which ran on my desktop and you simply needed an ESXi-Arm host. This really goes to show the level of compatibility from a management and vSphere API point of view that an ESXi-Arm host behaves just like a standard x86 ESXi host!

To demonstrate a more interesting use case than just basic network customization for the ?first? Arm OVA, I thought it would be useful to setup a simple NFS appliance that would take input from the user such the size of the exported volume (default 60GB) and then the name of the mount point. Upon first boot up, there is a guest customization script that would read in the OVF properties and configure the networking, OS password and NFS server configuration which you can certainly use to host your Arm VMs.

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Kubernetes on ESXi-Arm using k3s

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The tiny form factor of a Raspberry Pi (rPI) is a fantastic hardware platform to start playing with the ESXi-Arm Fling. You can already do a bunch of fun VMware things like running a lightweight vSAN Witness Node to setting up basic automation environment for PowerCLI, Terraform and Packer to running rPI OS as VM, enabling some neat use cases like consolidating your physical rPI assets which might be running RetroPi and Pi-Hole which many home labbers are doing.

In addition to VMware solutions, its is also a great platform to learn and tinker with new technologies like Kubernetes (K8s) which I am sure many of you have been hearing about 🙂 Although our vSphere with Tanzu and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) does not currently work with the ESXi-Arm Fling, I have actually been meaning to try out a super lightweight K8s distribution designed for IoT/Edge called k3s (pronounced k-3-s) which also recently joined Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox level.

k3s is supported on rPI and you normally would have multiple rPI devices to represent the number of nodes, for example if you want a basic 3-Node cluster, you would need three physical rPI devices. With ESXi-Arm, you can now create these nodes as VM, using just a single rPI. This opens up the door for all sorts of explorations, you can create HA cluster or try out more advanced features which might be more difficult if you needed several physical devices. If you mess up, you can simply re-deploy the VM without much pain or simply clone the VM.

In my setup, I am using 3 x Photon OS VMs. One for the primary node and two for k3s worker nodes. You can certainly install k3s on any other Arm-based OS including rPI OS (which can now run as a VM as mentioned earlier).


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