It has been about two weeks since the release of the ESXi-Arm Fling and the team could not have been more excited to see the level of engagement from both the VMware community but also the broader IT community. In fact, the VMware Flings team just recently shared the top 10 Flings in the last 30days and it was very humbling to see that ESXi-Arm Fling has already made its way up to #1 which is not an easy spot to beat, especially given the fact that the amazing OS Optimization Tool fling has had that spot for the past 4 years!

The ESXi-Arm team would like thank everyone who has tried out the Fling and to those that have tweeted, slacked, DM’ed, LinkedIn and emailed us on how they are using ESXi-Arm. Amazing does not even describe some of the cool setups that we have seen and I am guessing this is just the beginning. Also, a special thank you to all the bloggers and reviewers who have written about ESXi-Arm, we really enjoy reading each and every single article, keep them up and share what you learn with the community.

Over the the past two weeks, we have received a ton of great feedback from the community. Today we are excited to release v1.1 of the ESXi-Arm Fling, which you can download by heading over to the Fling website: https://flings.vmware.com/esxi-arm-edition

One very important thing to be aware of if you have already installed ESXi-Arm is that an upgrade is not possible or supported. You will need to perform a fresh installation and apply any configuration changes that you may have made outside of the system defaults. However, if you have Virtual Machines that have been deployed on the same storage device as the ESXi-Arm installation, you do have the option to preserve the VMFS volume and thus preserving your existing Virtual Machine workloads. After the installation, you can simply browse to the vSphere Datastore and re-register the Virtual Machines using either the ESXi Embedded Host Client or using the vSphere UI which is part of vCenter Server.

Fixes/Enhancements

• Fix for https://flings.vmware.com/esxi-arm-edition/bugs/1098 (PSOD adding to VDS)
• Pass-thru stability improvements to LS1046A and LX2160A platforms
• Fix for vCenter/DRS incorrect CPU usage
• Fix for VM crash when VM storage fills up
• Stability fix for non-coherent DMA device support
• Installer: tolerate RAM size within 4% of 4GB instead of 3.125 (for the otherwise unsupported RK3399 boards)
• Serial port handling improvements (for unsupported/unknown boards, to be a bit more resilient of firmware configuration errors)

New Hardware Platforms

• Support for the LS1046A-based NXP Reference Design Board (RBD) has been added
• Support for Arm Neoverse N1 System Development Platform has been added

For detailed instructions for installing ESXi-Arm for these platforms, please download the respective PDF files on the Fling website.

Updated Arm Guest OSes

When we launched the ESXi-Arm Fling,  there were only 6 Arm Guest Operating Systems that the team had tested and validated to work with ESXi-Arm. Since then, the community has really shown us what was possible and has gone above and beyond in demonstrating many other Guest OSes that could be installed on ESXi-Arm which opens up the door to many new possibilities. There are now a total of 13 Arm Guest OSes that can be installed and for community verified Guest OS, we have included links to the original authors. If there are additional guest OSes that is not on the list and is known to work, please drop us a note and we will be more than happy to include it in the next documentation update.

• Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
• CentOS Linux 8
• openSUSE Leap 15.2
• Photon OS 3.0
• Debian 10.x
• Fedora 32 Server
• FreeBSD (New)
• NetBSD (New)
• Alpine (New)
• Devuan (New)
• RHEL 8.3 Beta (New)
• Oracle Linux 7 (New)
• Raspberry Pi OS (New)

Documentation

Last but not least, the team has put in a lot of time to ensure that we have clear and concise documentation for our end users. We hope that you spend the time to review the documentation carefully as it does cover many aspects of using ESXi-Arm, especially across the different supported hardware platforms including any gotchas or known issues. With that, we have also made several updates to our documentation based on your feedback and as always, if you have any feedback or comments, feel free to drop us a line.

• Moved and expanded iSCSI doc for Pi doc to main ESXi-Arm Fling doc
• Added LS1046ARDB docs (including ref to it from main ESXi-Arm doc and Fling website)
• Fixed Ampere server name and links (it’s HR330A/HR350A, not SR-something)
• Added Arm N1SDP document (including ref to it from main ESXi-Arm doc)
• Updated Guest OSes known to work with ESXi-Arm including new “Verified” section
• Updated instruction to update EEPROM for Pi doc