ESXi-Arm Fling Twitter Digest #1

Almost a week into the Fling, there’s already an huge amount of generated content that is very hard to catalogue and organize. It’s been amazing to see the passion and excitement from both VMware, Open Source and Arm communities. There are folks putting their heart and soul into trying things out, e.g. on late nights, building Pi clusters, pushing the envelope on what works and even doing some hardcore engineering to enable more guest operating systems to run. It was thrilling to get positive feedback on the documentation, on the quality/smoothness of the fling installation and hear all the interesting ideas and use-cases people come up with.

My main takeaway: there’s only one thing more amazing than the VMware, Open Source and the Arm communities – the combination of all three put together. You folks are amazing and we look forward to being able to delight you further in the future.

Here are my highlights of the Twitter buzz so far:

1. First off, in what may be a hard record to beat, The Register (my personal favorite) has now a fourth article this year about ESXi-Arm! Not bad for something that’s not even a product yet ?.

   VMware emits a tech preview of its ESXi-Arm port for folks with a spare Raspberry Pi 4, or other kit, to test https://t.co/wivkz44Gk8

   — The Register (@TheRegister) October 7, 2020

2. vSAN witness node using a Raspberry Pi! I said it was not possible – and as usual, I was wrong, much to the delight of homelabbers worldwide. This is really cool stuff!

   This is cool stuff! See this from William Lam vSAN Witness using Raspberry Pi 4 & ESXi-Arm Fling @lamw https://t.co/ra4dNtlwrI

   — Marcus Hüller (@MarcusHueller) October 9, 2020

3. Remember the guy who put Windows 10 on a Lumia, a HP calculator and the Nintendo Switch? Well… ?

   Didn’t expect this when we said #ESXionARM all the things … ?

   Its been really cool to see all your experiment and hacks @imbushuo Keep up the awesome work, next up a Tesla? ? https://t.co/44DcQdc0Hl

   — William Lam (@lamw) October 9, 2020

4. William Lam actually has been on fire, with multiple awesome blog posts about ESXi-Arm on his well-respected site.

   With the release of the @esxi_arm Fling, it's important to know which components you need to run it. ?

   Check out @lamw's blog to find out the build-of-materials he uses: https://t.co/QfeeBghF4W pic.twitter.com/d9cRV6qYr4

   — VMware (@VMware) October 9, 2020

5. Check out the special vSpeaking Podcast on the Arm Fling!

   Off course there is a vSpeaking Podcast on @esxi_arm – And its Must Listen! @vPedroArrow @Lost_Signal @lamw
   https://t.co/CUCdteXwni @Arm

   — Bhumik Patel (@bhumikp) October 8, 2020

6. Veeam appears to work great with ESXi-Arm.

   In case you're wondering, yes you can backup and restore @esxi_arm VMs with @Veeam. pic.twitter.com/FSqzCxX4I4

   — JD Wallace (@jdwallace) October 10, 2020

7. vRealizeOps works great as well!

   Making sure my @esxi_arm on @Raspberry_Pi Host/Cluster/VMs are running smooth by monitoring with @vRealizeOps 8.2. This has to be the best @vmwflings ever released by @VMware. Everything working awesome. Next test is to create new ARM VMs with @vRealizeAuto. pic.twitter.com/RLBtXgpkyB

   — Dale Hassinger (@dalehassinger) October 11, 2020

8. NetBSD has gone from nothing to full working desktop with even para-virtualized  (VMXNET3) networking support, courtesy of @jmcwhatever and @rsh. Can’t wait for working images to appear on armbsd.org.

   Not exactly what I had planned on doing today.. NetBSD's input layer couldn't deal with an absolute mouse pointer event that wasn't 1:1 with the screen dimensions. So I fixed it. Now mouse input works in ESXi-Arm! pic.twitter.com/4te00a4kWl

   — Jared McNeill (@jmcwhatever) October 10, 2020

9. Not to be outdone by the NetBSD folks, @DarkainMX did some monumental work to get FreeBSD to boot inside an ESXi-Arm VM, including getting open-vm-tools working. There still something wrong with SMP VMs, but hey, ZFS works great!

   FreeBSD under VMware ESXi on Arm Fling https://t.co/tzOGhtHV0q

   — DiscoverBSD.com (@_DiscoverBSD) October 9, 2020

10. Showing off Doom inside an ESXi-Arm VM is apparently a thing ?.. Not to be outdone, here’s my take!

    Doom with @esxi_arm is much better with sound pic.twitter.com/sxTY4j16F4

    — It's an Arm world (virtualized) (@WhatAintInside) October 12, 2020