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Stateless ESXi-Arm with Raspberry Pi

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I am super excited to be able to finally share, what I think, is a really cool ESXi-Arm solution which has been an evolution of this and this. This solution also incorporates a number of automation techniques I have shared over the years when it comes to ESXi scripted installation aka Kickstart, so it was really neat to all those things get pulled into a single solution. Lastly, I also want to give huge thanks to Cyprien Laplace who threw the initial challenge my way after I had shared how to perform an ESXi-Arm scripted installation without using SD Card.

ESXi-x86 can be deployed using either a stateful or stateless installation. In the latter case, ESXi is booted over the network using the vSphere Auto Deploy feature in vCenter Server which does not require any local media for ESXi. Upon attaching itself to vCenter Server, Auto Deploy then leverages vSphere Host Profiles and its rules engine to determine which configurations or profiles should be applied to ensure the ESXi hosts are configured per their desired stated. Here is a quick video overview of how Auto Deploy and Host Profiles work.

Fundamentally, vSphere Auto Deploy and Host Profiles can also work with ESXi-Arm but today, vCenter Server would require some code modification for this to actually work.

OK, so am I teasing you with something that does not exists? Nope, but I just wanted to help set the context 🙂

The solution that I have created boots ESXi-Arm over the network in a "stateless" manner, so there is no need for an SD Card or USB device plugged into the Raspberry Pi (rPI). In addition to the ESXi-Arm files, it also includes a custom payload which runs to retrieve additional configurations which can automatically join a desired vCenter Server as well as apply further customizations of an ESXi-Arm host. As you can see, this solution behaves similar to that of vSphere Auto Deploy and Host Profiles but does not use either of these vSphere features and works with the ESXi-Arm Fling right now.

Technically speaking, these techniques can also be applied to ESXi-x86 but I will leave that to the reader for further exploration.

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Identifying ESXi boot method & boot device

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There was an interesting discussion on our internal Socialcast platform last week on figuring out how an ESXi host is booted up whether it is from local device like a disk or USB device, Auto Deploy or even boot from SAN along with its respective boot device? Although I had answered the question, I was not confident that we actually had a reliable and programmatic method for identifying all the different ESXi boot methods, which of course piqued my interest.

With a bit of trial and error in the lab, I believe I have found a method in which we can identify the ESXi boot type (Local, Stateless, Stateless Caching, Stateful or Boot from SAN) along with some additional details pertaining to the boot device. To demonstrate this, I have created the following PowerCLI script ESXiBootDevice.ps1 which contains a function called Get-ESXiBootDevice.

The function can be called without any parameters, in which it will query all ESXi hosts for a given vCenter Server and/or standalone ESXi host. You can also specify a specific ESXi host by simply passing in the -VMHostname option.

Here is an example output for one of my lab environments which shows several ESXi hosts and their different boot methods from local disk to Auto Deploy which can include stateless, stateless caching and stateful deployments. Depending on the BootType, the boot device shown in the Device column will either be the MAC Address of the NIC used to network boot the ESXi host or the identifier of a disk device. I have also included some additional details such as vendor/model along with the media type (SAS, SSD or USB) which is available as part of ESXCLI.


This script also supports ESXi environments that boot from SAN (FC, FCoE or iSCSI) and you can easily identify that with the word "remote" for the BootType. I would like to give a huge thanks to David Stamen who helped me out with the boot from SAN testing.