"VMware has quietly debuted a technology preview of its flagship ESX hypervisor that is capable of running on Arm processors and servers. The virtualization giant teased its new tech in a Xeet which piqued our interest and led to the discovery of this document [PDF] on the public internet that explains the hypervisor supports guests running RHEL, Ubuntu, and SUSE, on servers from HPE and Gigabyte powered by Ampere processors, or Supermicro's ARS-221GL model with an Nvidia Grace processor."
"The document offers slightly contradictory advice to the effect that "Arm host clusters must be managed by a separate, standalone vCenter running on x86. We do not recommend managing x86 installations and Arm installations from the same vCenter." The tech preview appears to be a very basic affair, as it lacks support for vSAN hyperconverged storage, NSX virtual networking, and plenty of other features VMware offers in its x86 hypervisor and Cloud Foundation (VCF) private cloud suite."
"VMware has also made it possible to access Arm guests from its desktop hypervisors. As disclosed last week in release notes for new versions of the Workstation and Fusion products that add "the ability to connect to remote ARM-based ESXi, allowing users to manage VMs on remote ARM servers directly from VMware Workstation or Fusion on any supported platform." Virtzilla is therefore making good on its promise to bring its hypervisor and VCF to the Arm architecture."
"The Broadcom business unit is porting its products because it thinks customers will increasingly turn to Arm servers on the network edge, perhaps for AI workloads. VMware is also aware that Arm processors can be more energy-efficient than x86 CPUs, and must also know that its hyperscale partners AWS, Microsoft, and Google aggressively promote their home-brew Arm processors as delivering superior performance-per-watt."
VMware has released a technology preview of its ESXi hypervisor that can run on Arm-based servers. The preview supports guest operating systems including RHEL, Ubuntu, and SUSE on hardware from HPE and Gigabyte using Ampere processors, and on Supermicro ARS-221GL systems using Nvidia Grace processors. Guidance indicates Arm host clusters should be managed by a separate standalone vCenter running on x86, and x86 and Arm installations should not be managed from the same vCenter. The preview lacks features such as vSAN and NSX that are available in the x86 hypervisor and VMware Cloud Foundation. VMware also enables connecting to remote Arm-based ESXi from Workstation and Fusion to manage VMs directly.
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