WilliamLam.com

  • About
    • About
    • Privacy
  • VMware Cloud Foundation
  • VKS
  • Homelab
    • Hardware Options
    • Hardware Reviews
    • Lab Deployment Scripts
    • Nested Virtualization
    • Homelab Podcasts
  • VMware Nostalgia
  • Apple

ESXi on Arm Fling is LIVE!

10.06.2020 by William Lam // 17 Comments


The highly anticipated ESXi on Arm Fling has just been announced and is NOW generally available as a new VMware Fling! Head over to https://community.broadcom.com/flings and be sure to carefully read through the documentation before try out the bits.

History

Although ESXi-Arm was publicly demo'ed at VMworld Europe 2018 during the closing keynote by Ray O'Farrell (former CTO of VMware), the reality was there was a ton more to do before ESXi-Arm could be a reality for VMware customers. The newly formed ESXi-Arm team at VMware has been hard at work these last couple of years working with both Arm and its eco-system in extending hardware standards, firmware standards (open contribution to UEFI), and certification beyond the existing Arm server ecosystem, which enabled us to support platforms like SmartNICs and the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi. This is just a glimpse into what it took to get where we are at today.

I am also excited to share that the Virtually Speaking Podcast crew has invited us back for an exclusive episode featuring both Andrei Warkentin and myself to dive deeper into the development of ESXi-Arm project at VMware. This is an episode you will not want to miss!

Hardware

The ESXi-Arm Fling supports a number of different Arm platforms ranging from a traditional Datacenter form-factor to both Near and Far Edge systems including the highly requested Raspberry Pi (rPI)! With the rPI, only the 4b model will be supported and although both the 4GB and 8GB memory model works with ESXi-Arm. We highly recommend folks invest in the 8GB model to be able to take advantage of more vSphere features and be able to run more workloads.


For a complete list of supported Arm hardware platforms, please refer to the ESXi-Arm documentation.

vCenter Support

For customers with an existing x86 vCenter Server or those that would like to deploy a new vCenter Server, you will be able to attach and manage ESXi-Arm hosts just like you normally would as long as you are using vCenter Server 7.0 or greater.


We expect the majority of vSphere platform features to "just work" like vMotion but there may be some features that may not work or have additional requirements.


For example, to enable vSphere HA and/or vSphere FT, the Fault Domain Manager (FDM) Client VIB must be installed on an ESXi-Arm host. Today, this VIB is distributed as part of vCenter Server and only x86 version of the client is available. We do provide FDM Client VIBs for ESXi-Arm as part of the ESXi-Arm Fling, but support will be limited to vCenter Server 7.0c and 7.0d. For detailed instructions, please refer to the ESXi-Arm documentation.

VMware Tools

VMware Tools for ESXi-Arm GuestOS is not bundled as part of ESXi-Arm Fling, but can be installed. To do so, you will need to compile open-vm-tools for your respective GuestOS. Instructions can be found in the ESXi-Arm Fling documentation and below, you can see a screenshot of VMware Tools for Arm successfully running on Ubuntu 20.04 GuestOS running on ESXi-Arm on the rPI 4.

vSAN Witness

Lastly, a popular use case that has been brought up when ESXi-Arm was initially demo'ed was the use of the rPI as an inexpensive vSAN Witness, which is a fantastic use case for ROBO & Edge locations. I am very happy to share that using an rPI 8GB as a vSAN Witness works! As you can see from the screenshot below, I have two physical Intel NUC 9th Pro configured in a 2-Node vSAN Cluster and I am using the rPI as vSAN Witness 😀


In case this was not clear, this is NOT officially supported but it does demonstrate the viability of this concept and and feedback from the our users would help drive the priority and the potential support for such a configuration. More details will be shared in a future blog post outlining the instructions on using rPI as vSAN Witness. Stay tuned!

As you can see, this is just a small taste of what can be done with the ESXi-Arm Fling and the possibilities are truly endless! The ESXi-Arm team is very excited to see what the community will do with the ESXi-Arm Fling, what type of use cases are you solving or workloads that you are running. Below are a few ways in how you can engage with the ESXi-Arm team and community.

Categories // ESXi-Arm, VSAN, vSphere Tags // Arm, ESXi, Raspberry Pi, witness

Updating the VSAN HCL & Release Catalog DB using VSAN API

06.15.2020 by William Lam // 3 Comments

Both the VSAN Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) and the VSAN Release Catalog database which provides VSAN build recommendations should be updated periodically to ensure that you have the latest VSAN recommendations from VMware. In addition to using the vSphere UI to perform these update, customers can also automate either of these tasks using the VSAN Management API which can be consumed using any of the supported VSAN Management SDKs including PowerCLI.


I recently had a question about which VSAN API to use to update VSAN Release Catalog.

[Read more...]

Categories // Automation, PowerCLI, VSAN Tags // hcl, VSAN

Automated vSphere 7 and vSphere with Kubernetes Lab Deployment Script

04.13.2020 by William Lam // 117 Comments

I know many of you have been asking me about my vSphere with Kubernetes automation script which I had been sharing snippets of on Twitter. For the past couple of weeks, I have been hard at work making the required changes between the vSphere 7 Beta and GA workflows, some additional testing and of course documentation. Hopefully the wait was worth it (I think it is) and if you enjoy the script or have benefited, please consider adding 🌟to the Github repo to show your support! Thanks and enjoy

Had to make some updates to one of my vGhetto Automated Lab Deployment Scripts

💥44min to automate all required #vSphere7 infrastructure! 🤛🎤🥳

1 x VCSA 7.0
3 x ESXi + vSAN 7.0
1 x NSX-T 3.0 UA
1 x NSX-T Edge

Need to clean up #ProjectPacific wording but its working great! pic.twitter.com/ZInPgVgbGS

— William Lam (@lamw.bsky.social | @*protected email*) (@lamw) April 4, 2020

The Github repository:

  • https://github.com/lamw/vghetto-vsphere-with-kubernetes-external-nsxt-automated-lab-deployment

Before getting started, please carefully read through the requirements section along with the complete sample end-to-end execution if you are new to vSphere with Kubernetes. You will need to have a VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.0 license before you can get started and specifically an NSX-T Advance license which is one of the required parameters within the script. If you do not have access to a VCF 4 license, I strongly recommend taking part in the recent VMUG Advantage Homelab Group Buy effort which I had started to easily get access to the latest VMware releases along with a nice 15% discount!

The script supports deploying both a standard vSphere 7 environment with just VCSA, ESXi and vSAN as well as the complete solution which includes NSX-T to support vSphere with Kubernetes. For more details, please refer to the FAQ.

Categories // Automation, Kubernetes, Nested Virtualization, NSX, VMware Tanzu, VSAN, vSphere, vSphere 7.0 Tags // Kubernetes, NSX-T, Project Pacific, VMware Cloud Foundation, vSphere 7.0, vSphere with Kubernetes

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • …
  • 15
  • 16
  • 17
  • 18
  • 19
  • …
  • 54
  • Next Page »

Search

Thank Author

Author

William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

Connect

  • Bluesky
  • Email
  • GitHub
  • LinkedIn
  • Mastodon
  • Reddit
  • RSS
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo

Recent

  • Ultimate Lab Resource for VCF 9.0 06/25/2025
  • VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on ASUS NUC 15 Pro (Cyber Canyon) 06/25/2025
  • VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) on Minisforum MS-A2 06/25/2025
  • VCF 9.0 Offline Depot using Synology 06/25/2025
  • Deploying VCF 9.0 on a single ESXi host? 06/24/2025

Advertisment

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy

Copyright WilliamLam.com © 2025

 

Loading Comments...