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Rocky Linux RC1 on ESXi-x86 & ESXi-Arm

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This morning, I saw that Rocky Linux RC1 was now available and includes support for both x86 and AARCH64 (Arm) and I wanted to give it a quick spin on both ESXi-x86 and ESXi-Arm.

ESXi-x86

I was succesful in installing Rocky Linux on ESXi-x86 using the CentOS GuestOS type and using the defaults. You will however need to disable Secure Boot (VM Options->Boot Options) as it is currently not supported.


If you do not, you will see the following error message when booting up the ISO: Verification failed: (0x1A) Security Violation


The default network adapter for this GOS in ESXi-x86 is using VMXNET3 and it was automatically detected. If you forgot to enable networking during the configuration wizard (like I did), you will need to login and edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ens* and change enable=yes and reboot for the changes to go into effect.


VMware Tools can be installed by running the following commands:

yum -y install open-vm-tools
systemctl enable vmtoolsd
systemctl start vmtoolsd

ESXi-Arm

I was succesful in installing Rocky Linux on ESXi-Arm using the CentOS GuestOS type and using the defaults. Networking for ESXi-Arm is using e1000e and if you forgot to enable networking during the configuration wizard (like I did), you will need to login and edit /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ens* and change enable=yes and reboot for the changes to go into effect.

Unlike Rocky Linux for x86, there is currently not a VMware Tools package that can be installed using yum and my attempts at compiling VMware Tools lead to missing packages that are currently not available in their repository. I have already filed an issue on the VMware Tools Github repo for tracking purposes.