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Kubernetes on ESXi-Arm using k3s

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The tiny form factor of a Raspberry Pi (rPI) is a fantastic hardware platform to start playing with the ESXi-Arm Fling. You can already do a bunch of fun VMware things like running a lightweight vSAN Witness Node to setting up basic automation environment for PowerCLI, Terraform and Packer to running rPI OS as VM, enabling some neat use cases like consolidating your physical rPI assets which might be running RetroPi and Pi-Hole which many home labbers are doing.

In addition to VMware solutions, its is also a great platform to learn and tinker with new technologies like Kubernetes (K8s) which I am sure many of you have been hearing about 🙂 Although our vSphere with Tanzu and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG) does not currently work with the ESXi-Arm Fling, I have actually been meaning to try out a super lightweight K8s distribution designed for IoT/Edge called k3s (pronounced k-3-s) which also recently joined Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Sandbox level.

k3s is supported on rPI and you normally would have multiple rPI devices to represent the number of nodes, for example if you want a basic 3-Node cluster, you would need three physical rPI devices. With ESXi-Arm, you can now create these nodes as VM, using just a single rPI. This opens up the door for all sorts of explorations, you can create HA cluster or try out more advanced features which might be more difficult if you needed several physical devices. If you mess up, you can simply re-deploy the VM without much pain or simply clone the VM.

In my setup, I am using 3 x Photon OS VMs. One for the primary node and two for k3s worker nodes. You can certainly install k3s on any other Arm-based OS including rPI OS (which can now run as a VM as mentioned earlier).


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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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Quick Tip - vmware-iso builder for Packer now supported with ESXi 7.0

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When vSphere 7.0 GA'ed earlier this year, one of the changes that I had noticed while going through the release notes was the removal of the VNC Server on ESXi. By default, this is disabled but users could enable it on a per-VM basis and connect to a specific VM using VNC. Not many customers used this feature and it made sense on why it was removed.

However, one implication is that if you use HashiCorp Packer and the vmware-iso builder to created automated images with ESXi, it will no longer work after upgrading to ESXi 7.0 as Packer relies on this VNC interface to send automated keystrokes to a VM as part of its automation. After learning about this change with vSphere 7.0, I filed a Packer Github Enhanacement to see if someone would be open to re-implementing the keystrokes functionality by leveraging the vSphere HTML5 Console SDK which would then allow for the use of VNC over websockets. The PR was closed about a month ago and while recently working on the vCenter Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) project, I finally got a chance to verify the feature after upgrading my physical ESXi host to latest 7.0 Update 1 and happy to share that the vmware-iso builder now functions as before.

The following two lines should be added to your Packer template:

"vnc_over_websocket": true
"insecure_connection": true

For reference, you can also refer to the VEBA Packer template

An alternative workaround is to use the vsphere-iso builder which leverages the vSphere USB scan codes API to send keystrokes into a VM without having to rely on the VNC interface. One downside is that you do need have a vCenter Server as the vsphere-iso builder interacts with the vSphere API on vCenter Server rather than directly going to ESXi and this would also impact anyone using Free ESXi to build their Packer images.

The primary reason that I had not switched over to the vsphere-iso builder was that I had quite a few Packer templates using the vmware-iso builder and the syntax was not portable between the two. For this reason alone, I decided to hold off upgrading my physical ESXi host to 7.0 until now.