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Will this Arm SoC work with ESXi-Arm?

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The number of Arm-based hardware kits has grown significantly in the last couple of years. Today, there are many more options to choose from including different form factors and even hardware from some of the more traditional x86 vendors, which also demonstrates the market opportunity and the demand for Arm-based workloads.

Running ESXi-Arm is definitely a great way to bring all the benefits of the VMware ESXi Hypervisor to your Arm-based workloads including leveraging the powerful vSphere platform by connecting that to an x86 vCenter Server.

As of this publishing this blog post (06/01/23), ESXi-Arm supports over a dozen different hardware platforms that spans Datacenter, Near Edge and Far Edge:

If you want to use ESXi-Arm, which is completely free, we definitely recommend looking at this list of Arm hardware kits and you can always find the latest supported Arm-based hardware under the ESXi-Arm Requirements section.

With that said, we continue to see new Arm-based kits and SoCs that are being released on a regular basis and question that I typically see get asked from our customers and field is will this work with ESXi-Arm?

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How to install PowerCLI 13.0 and use new Image Builder & Auto Deploy cmdlets on Apple Silicon?

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PowerCLI 13.0 was just released about a week ago and I have been using it like crazy, especially with the new Image Builder and Auto Deploy cmdlets, which have now been ported over to PowerShell Core and finally removing the Windows-only dependency for these specific cmdlets! 😀

I have both an x86 macOS system and the new Apple Silicon M1 (Arm) and of course, I wanted to have PowerCLI running on both systems! While the installation/upgrade of PowerCLI for x86 is trivial, it was definitely less so on the M1. Part of the challenge is also due to the new requirement with latest PowerCLI 13.0 release, which folks should be aware of as it does have additional implications in how you manage and deploy PowerCLI within your organizations.

PowerCLI 13.0 now has an external dependency on Python 3.7.x runtime, which is specific when needing to use the new Image Builder and Auto Deploy cmdlets. The official PowerCLI User Guide contains instructions on how to install the Python runtime and the required packages across the three OS platforms (Windows, macOS and Linux). While the external dependency of Python is new, the requirement for Python to use these cmdlets has always been there and earlier releases of PowerCLI, it was just packaged as part of PowerCLI.

I only bring up this detail because it ultimately helped me figure out how to get PowerCLI 13.0 working on the Apple M1, especially with the additional Python requirement which includes one specific shared library that is dependent on the x86 architecture.

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How to install Windows 11 Arm with a vTPM using ESXi-Arm v1.11 

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The ESXi-Arm team has just released v1.11 of the ESXi-Arm Fling and one of the most exciting new capability is that you can now run Windows 11 Arm using an ESXi VM! There is also a TON of new features, so definitely check out the official ESXi-Arm Blog post announcement for more details.

One of the requirements for running Windows 11 Arm is the need for a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Luckily, the latest ESXi-Arm v1.11 also now supports adding a vTPM to a guest and a requirement for setting this is a Key Management Server (KMS). Currently, the ESXi-Arm Fling is based on vSphere 7.0 (GA) and you can either use an existing compatible KMS (which you can look through VMware KMS Compatibility List) or for lab/testing purposes, you can use my KMIP Docker Container, which was also updated recently to support both amd64 and arch64 architecture.

For those interested in quickly setting this up and using my KMIP Docker Container for the KMS component, below is a quick walkthrough on how to set this up.

UPDATE (10/16/23) - vCenter Server may not be needed as you can use ESXi vSphere API to manually add encryption keys for use with vTPM, at least for x86. This same technique might also work with ESXi-Arm, for more information please see this blog post HERE.

Note: While vSphere 7.0 Update 2 introduced an embedded Native Key Provider (NKP) within vCenter Server, it can not be used with ESXi-Arm as both ESXi and vCenter must be running 7.0 Update 2 and the ESXi-Arm Fling is based on 7.0 GA.

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