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ESXi running in unexpected places ...

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I am still blown away by the diversity of hardware platforms and environments that our customers continue to run their mission critical workloads using ESXi, VMware's Enterprise Type-1 Hypervisor. VMware ESXi is literally deployed in every market segment and vertical that you can imagine and even ones that you may not think of across land ⛰️, air 🛫, sea 🛳️ and even space 🚀.

I still vividly remember back in 2012, when ESXi was able to run on an Apple Mac Mini and how that enabled a new class of use cases for accelerated development and testing of iOS and MacOS applications that was just never possible before. In fact, this also enabled our partners like MacStadium, one of the largest Virtualized MacOS infrastructure provider running on VMware to deliever this offering as-a-service. Most recently, I also learned the popular Github Actions, specifically when using MacOS virtual environments, that it was also leveraging VMware under the hood which is very cool if you ask me!?

Another memorable moment was in 2018, a huge 🎤👊 at our VMworld conference when Ray O'Farrell (former VMware CTO) picked up a tiny device, which we learned was a Raspberry Pi running ESXi and VMware finally introduced to the world our ESXi-Arm initiative.

The ESXi Hypervisor has certainly come a long way from the early days of the VMware Hardware Compatibility (HCL) and VMware continues to expand into new markets and form factors like Data Processing Units (DPUs) as part of the recently announced Project Monterey. Edge computing is another area that is growing extremely rapidly and this recent article featuring our CEO Raghu states that "Edge computing is growing faster than Cloud" which will certainly drive further innovations with our ESXi platform to meet the needs of our customers.

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DFI GHF51 - Worlds smallest AMD Ryzen SBC

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Awhile back I came to learn about an interesting AMD single board computer (SBC) from a company called DFI, which specializes in building embedded solutions and industrial motherboards. There are a number of vendors in this space, including OnLogic, Rugged Computers, ASRock Industrial to name a few and Bivrost which I had recently came to learn about. The Industrial vertical is actually a really interesting segment of the market that includes manufacturing, oil, gas and utilities and is often associated with the Internet of Things (IoT), also referred to as the Industrial IoT (IIoT) market.

The demands and requirements of the Industrial IoT market is wildly different from your typical Enterprise datacenter, especially when you think about some of the harsh environments that hardware must run whether that is a manufacturing facility to a remote oil rig. It is not uncommon that the hardware used must be able to withstand extreme temperature changes with greater levels of reliability but also longer duration of support and product availability for up to 10 years!


With all that said, I was pretty intrigued with their latest offering called the GHF51, which comes in at an ultra tiny 1.8" inches and is dubbed the worlds smallest board with an AMD Ryzen CPU. You can see how tiny the SBC is compared to a lego mini-figure pictured above.

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Cluster API BYOH Provider on Photon OS (Arm) with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE) and ESXi-Arm

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Last week I demonstrated how to take advantage of the new Kubernetes Cluster API Bring Your Own Host (BYOH) Provider with a VM running on ESXi-Arm and managed with Tanzu Community Edition (TCE). The Cluster API BYOH Provider is currently only tested and supported with an Ubuntu OS, but since the only requirements for a linux host was simply: kubeadm, kubelet and containerd, I figured it should also be possible with VMware's Photon OS which also has an Arm edition.

With a TON of trial/error and reverting snapshots, I was able to finally get Cluster API BYOH Provider to successful run on Photon OS as shared in a recent tweet.

What actually made this possible was actually the work I had done with VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) project which also involves Photon OS and Kubernetes. More specifically, I had recently worked on porting VEBA from using the Docker runtime to Containerd with Kubernetes and that prior experience was invaluable while figuring out how to do this with Photon OS (Arm) which also had its own challenges. The instructions below will help setup a Photon OS (Arm) VM that can then be used with Cluster API BOYH Provider and the previous article will still need to be reference for the complete setup.

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