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How to copy the Raspberry Pi UEFI files and boot ESXi-Arm using just USB device?

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There are actually a number of ways to boot and install the ESXi-Arm Fling, but the easiest method is already outlined in the official ESXi-Arm Raspberry Pi (rPI) documentation and the PDF can be downloaded from the Fling website. As a quick refresher, you only need to have two storage devices.

  • SD Card - Used to store the rPI UEFI files which is required to boot ESXi-Arm Installer
    • ESXi-Arm can not run on SD Card and for these reasons, you do not need a large capacity SD Card
  • USB Device - Contains ESXi-Arm Installer / Installation
    • After the ESXi-Arm installer boots, you can actually re-use the exact same USB device for the installation of ESXi-Arm itself. A separate USB device is not required unless that is your goal or if the capacity is not enough for running VMs

The boot process after the ESXi-Arm installation is that the UEFI firmware will first load on the rPI and then it will boot up the ESXi-Arm from the USB device. As mentioned, there are other variations but this is the most basic option. The other nice behavior is that if you need to re-install ESXi-Arm, you simply create a bootable USB device with the ESXi-Arm installer and then install that right on the same USB device without having to mess with UEFI image. This also allows you to perform scripted installation also known as Kickstart, which is something I will be covering in the future that takes UEFI image into consideration.

I have seen a few questions asked whether it is possible to have everything run off of the SD Card and/or USB Device and the answer is yes to certain degree.

  • It is possible to put the ESXi-Arm installer + UEFI on SD Card but ESXi-Arm will NOT be able to use it as installation media, so there is not a whole ton of value there.
  • It is possible to have both the UEFI image and ESXi Installation on the same USB device, especially if you do not have spare SD Cards which apparently has come up a few times

In this blog post, I will outline the instructions for booting an installed ESXi-Arm installation completely off of the USB device without the needing an SD Card containing the UEFI image.

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OVFTool 4.4.1 - Upload OVF/OVA from URL using upcoming "pull" mechanism

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I was helping a fellow colleague yesterday with an OVA question and I came to learn about an upcoming feature in the popular OVFTool utility that would allow for a new method of uploading a remote OVF/OVA to either a vCenter and/or ESXi endpoint.

Historically, when you upload an OVF/OVA whether that is stored locally or remotely from a URL, the data path will actually transfer through the system running the OVFTool between the source and destination, which is ultimately the ESXi host which performs the actual download. Although the OVF/OVA data is not actually stored on your local system, the traffic is proxied through your system and can add an unnecessary hop if the remote OVF/OVA URL can directly be accessed by ESXi host.

A new --pullUploadMode flag has been introduced in the latest OVFTool 4.4.1 release, which will allow ESXi host to directly download (pull) from the remote OVF/OVA URL, assuming it has connectivity. In addition to version of OVFTool, you will also need to have either ESXi 6.7 or 7.0 environment for this new feature to work.

Disclaimer: Although this feature is available in latest OVFTool release, it is still under development and should be considered a Beta feature in case folks are interested in trying it out.

Since the ESXi host is directly downloading from the remote source, there are two additional security verification that has already been implemented. The first is an additional vSphere Privilege called "Pull from URL" which is under the vApp section. Without this, you will get a permission denied error.


Secondly, in addition to specifying the new CLI option, you will also need to provide another flag called --sourceSSLThumbprint which should include the SHA1 hash of endpoint hosting the OVF/OVA. This is an additional verification to ensure the validity of the server hosting the OVF/OVA.

Here is an example of deploying my latest ESXi 7.0 Update 1 Virtual Appliance OVA which is remotely hosted. The quickest way to obtain the SHA1 thumbprint is simply opening browser to based URL which is https://download3.vmware.com/


You will need to replace the space with ":" (colon), so the final string should look like BA:C6:4E:D9:AD:D4:53:B5:86:5A:5D:70:36:CF:89:93:D1:6C:F9:63

Note: The SHA1 thumbprint example shown above is only valid as of Oct 2020, as TLS certificates are replaced periodically, the SHA1 hash will change.

Here is an example OVFTool command to deploy from the remote URL

ovftool \
--X:logFile="ovftool.log" \
--acceptAllEulas \
--allowAllExtraConfig \
--allowExtraConfig \
--noSSLVerify \
--sourceSSLThumbprint="B2:52:9E:4D:57:9F:EA:53:4D:A0:0B:7F:D4:7E:55:91:56:C0:64:BB" \
--name="Nested-ESXi-7.0-Update-1-Appliance" \
--datastore=sm-vsanDatastore \
--net:"VM Network"="VM Network" \
--pullUploadMode \
https://download3.vmware.com/software/vmw-tools/nested-esxi/Nested_ESXi7.0u1_Appliance_Template_v1.ova \
'vi://*protected email*:[email protected]/Primp-Datacenter/host/Supermicro-Cluster'

If we switch over to the vSphere UI, we should see a new task called "Download remote files" which indicates the new pull method is being leveraged. One thing to note is that because ESXi is now performing the download directly, progress may not be known by the OVFTool client, since it is not longer the source for the data transfer. Another thing to be aware of is that OVFTool itself has built-in retry logic in case there is a slight interruption during the data transfer with the current mechanisms. In the "pull" scenario, there is no retry by ESXi and so depending on connectivity, its possible deployments can fail and complete re-transfer would be required.

How to run Raspberry Pi OS as a VM on ESXi-Arm

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It has only been a week since the ESXi-Arm Fling was released, but the amount of experimentation and frankly cool s*** that people have been able to do in such a short period of time has been pretty mind blowing. For example, did you know you could run ESXi-Arm on Nintendo Switch!?🤯

Andrei recently published a blog post on the official ESXi-Arm blog showcasing some of the really cool stuff the community has shared on Twitter, definitely worth checking digest post #1 it out if you have not seen it.

Something that really caught my eye which I did not see mentioned in Andre's blog post was from Twitter user Joakim Korhonen who shared that he was able to run Raspberry Pi's (rPI) OS (formally Raspbian OS) as a Virtual Machine running on top of the ESXi-Arm Fling!

This is pretty interesting because rPI OS was designed to run on a physical rPI and there are no installers other than the image file which you download and copy onto the SD Card to boot. What is really exciting about this news is that you can now run any of the popular rPI applications such as RetroPi or Pi-hole which traditionally may have required several rPI to host.

In addition, this can also benefit the rPI OS development community by making it easier to build and test applications on top of rPI OS as you can now spin these up as VMs and get all the benefits of vSphere and ESXi such as snapshots, cloning, etc. The possibilities are endless and wanted to give a huge thanks to Joakim for sharing his hack on getting this to work on ESXi-Arm. For those interested, I have documented the detailed instructions below.

UPDATE (08/27/23) - See this post HERE on instructions for updating to the latest Linux kernel for rPI OS

UPDATE (11/106/20) - For those familiar with VMware Virtual Appliances (OVA) and using custom OVF properties for guest/application customization, be sure to check out this complimentary blog post on how to build your own rPI OS OVA that can allow you to easily deploy additional rPI OS VMs with ease, especially useful for testing and development purposes.

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