Arm

VEBA + Knative + k3s on ESXi-Arm

01.26.2021 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

In response to a customer request to add Arm64 support for our VMware Event Router, I have been spending some more time playing with k3s (lightweight Kubernetes distribution for Arm) running on ESXi-Arm using a Raspberry Pi. Not only was this a good learning experience that exposed to me to the broader Arm ecosystem, which is still maturing but it also took me down several 🐰🕳️ which got me exploring new tools that I had never used before such as Buildpacks and Docker buildx to name a few.

This past weekend, I was finally successful in setting up our VMware Event Router for Arm using the Knative processor on a k3s cluster using ESXi-Arm running on a Raspberry Pi 4b 8GB model! As of writing this, the following versions were used:

Knative Serving v0.20.0
Knative Net Contour v0.20.0
Knative Eventing v0.20.1
RabbitMQ Cluster Operator v0.5.0

Made some more progress w/@KnativeProject + @VMWEventBroker on k3s on @esxi_arm

✅ Knative Serving & Eventing
✅ @RabbitMQ Operator & Eventing
✅ @projectcontour
✅ @VMware Event Router

Just need to figure out @buildpacks_io for Arm64 - https://t.co/ChdkMLSXMp looks promising pic.twitter.com/XFWDiGONSB

— William Lam (@lamw) January 24, 2021

In addition, I was able to also convert the Knative python echo function that was originally created by my colleague Michael Gasch and build an Arm64 version of the Knative python echo function which demonstrates the integration of VEBA with the Knative processor connected to a vCenter Server as my event source.

🥳 Successfully deployed & verified my arm64 python echo func w/@VMWEventBroker (Event Router) using the @KnativeProject processor!

Awesome for lightweight testing/development purposes on small VM w/k3s on @esxi_arm

Heck, don’t even need real vCenter, can run vcsim locally! pic.twitter.com/DuI16fvXfs

— William Lam (@lamw) January 24, 2021

For those interested in just the VMware Event Router Arm64 image, you can access it here and we plan to make that an official image shortly. For those interested in setting up a fully functional Arm deployment of VEBA and Knative processor, you can find the detailed instructions below.

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ESXi-Arm Licensing Options

12.12.2020 by William Lam // Leave a Comment

The the adoption of the ESXi-Arm Fling has skyrocketed since its initial launch back in October and has already surpassed over 10K+ downloads in its first month of release!

Just got an update from the @vmwflings team that the #ESXionARM Fling has already surpassed 10K+ downloads since its release! 🤯

Thank you to everyone in the community who’s participated, especially those who’ve shared their feedback & those doing some really stuff with it!

— William Lam (@lamw) November 18, 2020

One interesting observation that I have noticed lately has been an increased in inquiries related to licensing ESXi-Arm. This week alone, I have seen this question come up at least a dozen plus times across various communication channels.

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How to run Kali Linux on ESXi-Arm

11.30.2020 by William Lam // 14 Comments

A few folks have been trying to get Kali Linux, a Debian-derived Linux distribution designed for digital forensics and penetration testing, to run on ESXi-Arm. Similiar to Raspberry Pi OS, the techniques outlined in this blog post can be used to convert the image-based system to a Virtual Machine that ESXi-Arm can then run natively. However, there is an issue when attempting to install grub during Step 16 where it can not locate an EFI partition.

With the help of Cyprien Laplace, we can now run Kali Linux on ESXi-Arm! You can find the detailed instructions below including installing VMware Tools for Kali Linux running on ESXi-Arm.

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