Today we are going to talk about the newly launched VMware’s product ESXi-Arm Fling. This will provide an opportunity to run the ESXi workload on ARM-based processors. This is very excited announcement from VMware. You can also download it from ESXi Arm Edition site.
Let’s have a look on its components one by one.
ESXi-Arm
ESXi-Arm is a version of ESXi built to run on 64-bit Arm processors. As we know current versions of ESXi is highly integrated with x86 processors but making it for ARM is also widen VMware’s reachability to multi platform. This will definitely help them to grow their market size from compute virtualization to non-traditional environments.
Devices integrated with ESXi-ARM can be seen in Data Centers, Edge devices and many more places. This work included extending hardware standards, firmware standards, and certification beyond the existing Arm server ecosystem, which enabled us to support platforms like SmartNICs and the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi, as per the blog on VMware, written by Kit Colbert.
The best use cases for ESXi-ARM would be mission critical workloads on a wind turbines running on SmartNICs and vSAN storage servers and witness appliances, and running on AWS Graviton in the cloud. They have called this project Project Monterey.
ESXi-Arm Fling
This is a VMware sponsored program designed to offer early stage or beta software to the VMware community to use, test, and provide feedbacks. Note it down that this kind of software are not generally available for production use to the customers.
The best part of this ESXi-ARM Fling is that it is available for Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB. There is an easily-accessible hardware platform for ESXi-Arm as per blog Kit writes.
Here is the simple snapshot how it will be looks like:
After installing, ESXi-Arm Fling can be managed by vCenter Server 7.0 or newer.
This new technology will surely bring some expansion in VMware ESXi customer base in up coming time. We will be testing it once soon.
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