Hi,
After more than a year, I've provisioned ESXi on Arm from scratch. Hence, maybe the following issues and improvement ideas are already known.
Add secure boot setup recipe
Actually the docs do not contain any information about how to configure secure boot.
Align the docs to the x86_64 docs structure
The actual docs structure confuses existing x86_64 ESXi users. Feature parity / feature completeness hasn't been reached yet, but somewhat a lot of features are the "same".
Setup of ESXi on Arm on the same media as the boot media stops the installation process.
It's not a fail-safe implementation. Better detect the situation and ask the user to choose another media.
No setup action to set time
During the setup the user isn't asked to check/set time.
Evaluation Mode expiration date is set to Sunday 17th April 2022. Date is set to October 19th 2021.
Chapter 4.5 NTP in docs doesn't provide the information about how to configure ntp. The user has to spend more "need-to-know's" time consulting the docs but it leads him in a wrong direction. Re-assembling the hardware with a real time clock has to be tackled first. Secure-boot is a must for far edge use cases. Add docs about combos like e.g. DS3231 Real Time Clock Modul + Let's Trust TPM.
Jumpstart plugin restore-security-policies activation failed
The warning is displayed. The setup does not stop. What is the warning about?
Changing language deletes tasks in progress
An ongoing upload task with completed information in percentage disappeared after the language has been changed to English.
Nothing has been uploaded. Changing the language - a warning is displayed, indeed, however, it was not clear that it includes storage tasks as well.
Rescanning adapters led to purple screen
Hot-plug injection of an usb media with rescan (pressed multiple times) led to purple screen. See attached pic.
Seems to correlate to 5.1.1.2 from the docs.
Detection of usb storage
Plugged-in usb media as vmfs storage isn't detected during boot. An automation for detection/mount would be nice to avoid additional user interaction.
/etc/init.d/usbarbitrator stop
partedUtil getptbl /dev/disks/<your vml.id>
Re-registering old w11 vm is displayed as invalid
I've changed the .vmx entries guestOS from "windows9-64" to "arm-windows11-64" and virtualHW.version to 21 as described in docs. With that it worked. It was confusing to find that incompatibility between arm64-vhw17 and arm64-vhw21 in "Upgrading from fling v1" and not in vm guest os docs chapters.
Provisioning a vm with Win11_24H2_English_Arm64 freezes
w11 on Rpi4 is a niche. I want to test some software scripts on wsl2. The latest w11 24h2 iso freezes during boot.
Is 24h2 supported?
There is the way with rufus w11 deactivation options and reimaging rufus' output though.
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Download bits used: VMware-VMvisor-Installer-8.0U3c-24449057.aarch64.iso
Hardware: Rpi4b with Rpi4 uefi firmware 1.32
Installation on a 32gb usb media, no dump partition