VMware on a Raspberry Pi!?!?! (ESXi Install)

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About this video

NetworkChuck installs VMware ESXi — a type 1 hypervisor normally run on large data-center servers — on a Raspberry Pi 4, explaining virtualization as slicing the Pi’s CPU, memory and storage so several operating systems run at once as separate virtual machines. He recommends the 8 GB Pi 4 (4 GB also works), a small microSD card, and two USB flash drives: a smaller one for the installer and a larger 64 GB or 128 GB one to hold ESXi and the VMs. Preparation starts by imaging Raspberry Pi OS Lite, booting the Pi and updating its firmware with sudo rpi-eeprom-update, then erasing the card and copying over the Raspberry Pi firmware files (deleting the four kernel files) plus the UEFI firmware files, and adding gpu_mem=16 to config.txt. He downloads the free ESXi ARM installer ISO from VMware, writes it to the small flash drive with Rufus (Etcher on Mac), boots the Pi while pressing Escape, and in Device Manager under Raspberry Pi Configuration disables the setting that limits RAM to 3 GB. From Boot Manager he boots the installer flash drive, presses Shift+O and appends autopartition with OSData size 8192 so ESXi only takes 8 GB of the drive, accepts the license, installs onto the larger flash drive, sets a root password, and then changes the boot order so the Pi boots ESXi first. Logging into the vSphere web interface as root, he uploads an ARM Ubuntu Server ISO to the datastore and creates his first VM, and shows Kali and CentOS VMs also running; across his two Pis — a cluster he calls ’the twins’, managed together in vCenter — he runs five VMs. He also adds his Synology NAS as NFS storage, and shows that to use an extra USB drive as a datastore you must stop the USB arbitrator service (/etc/init.d/usbarbitrator stop) and disable it at boot with chkconfig, then clear the drive’s partition table and create the datastore. He frames the project as a cheap way — roughly $100 per Pi kit, per his claim — to learn enterprise VMware skills such as vSphere, clustering and shared storage.

Key takeaways

ESXi is a type 1 hypervisor that slices one Raspberry Pi 4 (8 GB recommended) into multiple simultaneous VMs
Prep: update Pi firmware, rebuild the microSD with Pi + UEFI firmware (delete kernel files), add gpu_mem=16 to config.txt
In the UEFI setup, disable the 3 GB RAM limit; at installer boot press Shift+O and append the autopartition OSData size 8192 setting
Install ESXi onto the larger USB drive, set it first in boot order, then manage everything through the vSphere web UI as root
Two Pis can be clustered in vCenter; stop the USB arbitrator service to turn an extra USB drive into a VMFS datastore

Episode details: published October 24, 2020 · 23:43 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are NetworkChuck’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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