ESXi Arm Edition on Raspberry Pi 4

https://flings.vmware.com/esxi-arm-edition#video

by kbumsik • 6 years ago

72 21 6 years ago

flings.vmware.com

zamadatix• 6 years ago

Finally! They've been teasing this for a long time. Looks like they support a few server boards as well, not just the Raspberry Pi.

tmysl2• 6 years ago

This is an awesome PoC for expanding on to ARM CPUs but i don't see the Pi being an efficient virtualization platform. Once you introduce the CPU/memory overhead of 2-3 vms will quickly degrade any meaningful CPU performance.

joeyrobert• 6 years ago

Might as well get the software ready now for the RPi 5 and beyond.

gruturo• 6 years ago

The Pi is a good testbed for validating the technology, but I expect this to be more focused on much, much beefier boards meant for datacenters. May as well start getting the bugs out now.

gwd3• 6 years ago

I'm not sure what use case VMWare is aiming at, but Xen is on loads of embedded systems now. These aren't large server VMs; typically they'd be some system where they have (say) one VM as a realtime OS controlling a piece of hardware, and another providing the UI. Under such a system you'd typically do a hard partition, assigning a fixed number of vcpus and memory to each VM.

The LF Edge project is specifically targeted at something about the size of an RPI, and wants to use virtualization for that case:

https://www.lfedge.org/

kbumsik• 6 years ago

I guess VMWare is aiming at server market. Here is the summary section of OP:

Over the past several years, you've seen us demonstrate our virtualization technology on the Arm platform across several use cases, everything from running mission critical workloads on a windmill, to running on the SmartNIC, to running on AWS Graviton in the cloud.

flatiron• 6 years ago

I’ve entirely moved away from VMs at home to Docker. Their ecosystem is quiet robust (maybe not the arm one) and even if there isn’t a docker image for what I want I can usually use the Alpine or Arch one as a base and with a few lines of config get something stood up.

tmysl2• 6 years ago

Im on board with the docker model here, a proper kubernetes deployment with shared storage will afford you the same fault tolerance vsan/vmotion would

cameron_b• 6 years ago

As a proof-of-concept the RPi is really easy to get your hands on. The same iso they distribute will run on some of the more niche 16 core A72 boards, but those are a fair bit more tailored to the deployment ( SFP+ NICs etc, ) and more expensive

rblatz• 6 years ago

VMotion still feels like magic.

j_walter• 6 years ago

This might be a good way to get a CTF/pentesting lab up and running on a RPi. I've been looking for a good way to do that where I can do my CTF tests remotely on my homelab.

papaf• 6 years ago

Is there any advantage of this over Qemu/kvm which I believe is supported on the Raspberry Pi?

space_ghost• 6 years ago

Centralized management would be a plus in some circles.

znpy• 6 years ago

In that sense, Proxmox should really receive more attention.

It's basically a clone of VMWare, but virtualization is based on KVM/Qemu, and can also boot LXC containers.

It's free and open source (it's based on Debian) but you can buy a license that translates to support.

edit: doesn't work on raspberry pi AFAIK, though.

fulafel• 6 years ago

libvirt (https://libvirt.org/apps.html) does this for kvm and works on Pi.

1MachineElf• 6 years ago

My employer recently added Pi support for their agent-based monitoring solution. There's also a VMware integration too. Now I can test both the Pi and the VMware functionality with a single device.

Kipters• 6 years ago

It can also boot on the Nintendo Switch: https://twitter.com/imbushuo/status/1314487034040311808

ESXi Arm Edition on Raspberry Pi 4

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