ESXi-Arm Fling

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Rocky/RHEL 8.x support on ESXi ARM Fling 8.0.3, 243644

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Eugene Kremenetsky posted Dec 10, 2024 01:59 PM

Hello,

I'm testing the ESXi ARM Fling 8.0.3, 243644 on an HPE RL300 and am running into issues with booting Rocky 8.9 Virtual machines that previously booted fine under 7.0.0, 22949429

The following modifications were made to the .vmx file as per the documentation with the 8.0.3 image.

virtualHW.version = "21"
guestOS = "arm-rockylinux-64" (also tried arm-rhel8-64)

During the loading of GRUB, the following error presents itself:

Below are the kernels available to the VM. Note again they booted fine under the 7.0.0, 22949429 image.

As a test I also booted the Rocky 8.9 aarch64 installer on a new VM, the result was the same, the installer fails to boot.

Any ideas? Or has support for RHEL/Rocky8 been dropped?

Broadcom Employee Cyprien Laplace posted Dec 11, 2024 05:15 PM Best Answer

Hi Eugene,

Sorry for the issue! In this fling v2 the support for 64 KB granule size has been removed as some virtual devices are not working properly in that configuration. Unfortunately the RHEL 8 and other distributions based on it were using those 64 KB page size. Starting with RHEL 9 the default kernel is using 4 KB granule size, and has an optional 64 KB kernel.

We are adding a config option to allow using 64 KB granule for the next fling v2 update, but this will be an unsupported option. It will however let you run the VM and update it to a 9.x version using the 4 KB page size.

doug rady posted Dec 14, 2024 12:41 AM

I hope 64KB granule size will be supported again.
Red Hat, SUSE and Ubuntu ship & support 64KB kernels.

Broadcom Employee Cyprien Laplace posted Dec 20, 2024 02:05 PM

The ESXi Arm Fling 2.1 update is live!

see https://community.broadcom.com/vmware-cloud-foundation/viewdocument/esxi-arm-fling-21-refresh?CommunityKey=b75c6afd-0c0c-4f39-89a4-018ed3a892d3

Eugene Kremenetsky posted Dec 20, 2024 05:27 PM

Thanks. I'll give the 2.1 image a whirl and see if that saves me the headache of upgrading all my Rocky 8 VMs.

A suggestion: add these changes to the release note pdf zip.

Also general comment, it'd be great if you could add the esxcli software profile update commands to the release notes as well for those updating from the offline zip. I think you had them in the early ESXi 7.0 days but they got dropped off.