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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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vSAN Witness using Raspberry Pi 4 & ESXi-Arm Fling

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As hinted in my earlier blog post, you can indeed setup a vSAN Witness using the ESXi-Arm Fling running on a Raspberry Pi (rPI) 4b (8GB) model. In fact, you can even setup a standard 2-Node or 3-Node vSAN Cluster using the exact same technique. For those familiar with vSAN and the vSAN Witness, we will need to have at least two storage devices for the caching and capacity tier.

For the rPI, this means we are limited to using USB storage devices and luckily, vSAN can actually claim and consume USB storage devices. For a basic homelab, this is probably okay but if you want something a bit more reliable, you can look into using a USB 3.0 to M.2 NVMe chassis. The ability to use an M.2 NVMe device should definitely provide more resiliency compared to a typical USB stick you might have lying around. From a capacity point of view, I had two 32GB USB keys that I ended up using which should be plenty for a small setup but you can always look at purchasing large capacity given how cheap USB devices are.

Disclaimer: ESXi-Arm is a VMware Fling which means it is not a product and therefore it is not officially supported. Please do not use it in Production.

With the disclaimer out of the way, I think this is a fantastic use case for an inexpensive vSAN Witness which could be running at a ROBO/Edge location or simply supporting your homelab. The possibilities are certainly endless and I think this is where the ESXi-Arm team would love to hear whether this is something customers would even be interested in and please share your feedback to help with priorities for both the ESXi-Arm and vSAN team.

In my setup, I have two Intel NUC 9th Pro which make up my 2-Node vSAN Cluster and then an rPI as my vSAN Witness. Detailed instructions can be found below including a video for those wanting to see vSAN Witness in action by actually powering on an actual workload 😀

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My Raspberry Pi 4 BOM for ESXi-Arm Fling

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With the release of the highly anticipated ESXi-Arm Fling, I thought it would be useful to share my hardware build-of-materials that I am currently using with ESXi-Arm Fling, especially as folks have been asking about what is possible or things to be aware of before purchasing a Raspberry Pi.

I do want to stress that the components listed below is just one of many options, it is highly recommend folks carefully review the ESXi-Arm Fling documentation to understand which accessories are supported along with some of their constraints prior to making a purchase.


Devices from Left to Right:

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