What looks like a funny joke sometimes turns out to be quite a serious project. This is rare, but it does happen. Just this week, a technical preview of the VMware ESXi hypervisor on the aarch64 architecture called ESXi-Arm-Fling was announced. In this article we will look at why and who needs it.
Over the past year, ARM has been a frequent topic of our articles. The traditional notion that ARM is exclusively for embedded systems and mobile phones is long gone. Huawei has unveiled its Taishan servers with a proprietary Kunpeng 920 ARM processor. Ampere announced128-core Altra Max processor, also on this architecture. Even Apple has decided to use ARM in their latest laptops. The trend was not spared by large software manufacturers, who were forced to pay attention to such dramatic changes and respond to them in a timely manner.
In 2018, at the VMworld conference, it was announced in a humorous form that ESXi could run on the Raspberry Pi. Then many took it as a joke. Let's take a look at how it was:
And now, almost two years later, when everyone forgot about it, it turns out that it was not a joke. The only question is: why try to run a hypervisor on such a device? Yes, the modern "raspberry" is a full-fledged computer, the size of a credit card, but it can hardly be called productive. Any hypervisor has very high hardware requirements, so there is more to it than the need to run virtual machines.
To clarify these points, let us pay attention to how the approach to the development of software and hardware technologies has changed. If earlier the solution of certain tasks required almost entirely hardware implementation, now software is in the lead here. It is this that creates additional layers of abstraction that transform the IT infrastructure towards software-defined environments. Data warehouses, networking infrastructure, servers and data centers are becoming software-defined.
On the one hand, this approach greatly simplifies the construction of complex systems, using abstractions as building blocks. This ensures maximum compatibility and efficient use of hardware power. But on the other hand, everything is not so rosy. Any abstractions increase resource consumption, which means that they consume more CPU time.
The way out is simple: to free up the resources of the central processor, you should give some of the calculations directly to peripheral devices, for example, network cards. The SmartNIC concept assumes that the network card will not take up precious processor time and will perform most of the actions inside itself.
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The bottom line is that you don't need a CISC processor to create a SoC version of a network card, ARM is enough. Here we got as close as possible to the answer to the main question of the article: why do we need a hypervisor on the Raspberry Pi? It's simple: it allows you to test the ESXi technology on ARM processors.
Indeed, for the same SmartNIC devices, it is required that the hypervisor be launched directly inside them. The popular raspberries are just a testing framework for technologies that VMware has high hopes for. Well, ordinary users and enthusiasts will have the opportunity to "run" several operating systems on their Raspberry Pi for free.
technical preview is already available for download under the name ESXi-Arm Fling at flings.vmware.com . There is also detailed instructions for installing on a Raspberry Pi 4. Please note that only Raspberry Pi 4 B with 4 or 8 GB memory is supported. 1GB and 2GB versions are not supported.
Why Fling? This is because it is the name of VMware's early software delivery program. It is not publicly available, nor does it have technical support, but it offers the community the very latest in assessment and testing tools. Feedback from community members helps make the end products more stable and reliable.
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