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ESXi-Arm Fling 1.13 Refresh

We have released a small update to the ESXi-Arm Fling today to address some issues reported by the community. New installs and upgrades from a previous installation of the ESXi-Arm 1.x Fling are supported. You can now update using the published Offline Bundle (zip), see below for instructions.

Tip: if your evaluation period has expired, you can perform a new installation; choose to preserve the VMFS filesystems, and register your VMs again.

DE-9M connector, representing virtual serial ports supported by ESXi-Arm

Changes in this release

  • Adds support for AHCI SATA controllers that do not support 64-bit addressing on systems with memory located above 4GB
  • Fixes a PSOD on GIGABYTE’s Ampere Altra and Altra Max systems with ASM1164 based SATA HBAs when one or more SATA disks are present
  • Virtual NVMe device data corruption fix
  • Virtual UEFI ACPI tables now only shows configured serial ports. An ACPI SPCR table is created for the first one found
  • UEFI real-time clock (RTC) support is now enabled on Rockchip based systems
  • Fixes a possible hang at shutdown on Rockchip based systems when using the onboard network interface
  • Upgrades using image profiles with the Offline Bundle (zip) are now possible on all systems
  • Fixes vVols connection failures

High Availability for vCenter Server 8.0+

This update comes with the FDM vibs required to enable High Availability in a cluster of Arm servers when connected to vCenter Server 8.0+ (for all versions of the ESXi Arm Fling).

Important:

  • You need to download the FDM vib with build number matching the vCenter Server being used. You can find that build number on the administration page: https://<vc>:5480/
  • The FDM vib must be manually installed on all the hosts of a cluster *before* enabling HA (or before adding a host to a HA enabled cluster); otherwise vCenter will try to push its x86 FDM vib on the Arm server.

Once the matching FDM vib has been copied to the host, install the vib with --no-sig-check (as those are not signed builds).

e.g. when using vCenter Server 8.0 Update 1, build number 21560480:

Note: Since vCenter Server 7.0 Update 1, vCLS Virtual Machines are required for DRS to function. Attempts to deploy those VMs built for x86 to the Arm servers will fail, and the cluster must be put in retreat mode for VC to stop trying. The Cluster Services health will be set to Degraded, and DRS is not functional. vSphere HA does not perform optimal placement during a host failure scenario. HA depends on DRS for placement recommendations. HA will still power on the VMs but these VMs might be powered on in a less optimal host.

Upgrading the ESXi-Arm Fling

Existing installs of the ESXi-Arm v1.x Fling can be upgraded in one of two ways:

  • Copy the ISO to boot media, run the installer, and select upgrade
  • Using the published Offline Bundle (zip) file

For details on upgrading with the Offline Bundle, see the VMware ESXI Upgrade Guide.

Contact us

We’d love to hear more about your plans for ESXi on Arm. Please reach out to us at [email protected] with the following details to help us shape future releases:

  • Company name
  • Arm platform of choice
  • Scale of deployment (number of servers/VMs)
  • Types of workloads and use cases
  • vSphere features of interest (HA, DRS, NSX, vSAN, Tanzu, vCD, etc)

Supported systems

The ESXi-Arm Fling should boot on any system that is (or close to) compliant to the Arm SystemReady ES or Arm SystemReady SR specifications. Known working systems include:

Datacenter and cloud

  • Ampere Computing Altra and Altra Max-based systems
  • Ampere Computing eMAG-based systems
  • Arm Neoverse N1 SDP

Near edge

  • SolidRun Honeycomb LX2
  • SolidRun MACCHIATObin or CN9132 EVB
  • NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier Development Kit

Far edge

  • Raspberry Pi 4B (4GB or 8GB models) and Pi 400
  • NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX Development Kit
  • NXP LS1046A Freeway Board and Reference Design Board
  • Socionext SynQuacer Developerbox
  • PINE64 Quartz64 Model A and SOQuartz (4GB or 8GB models)
  • Firefly Station M2 and Station P2 (4GB or 8GB models)

If you are running the Fling on a system not on this list, please let us know!

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