[Mashiro]

Hello Post4VPS Community

I would like to share some interesting recent news with you regarding the very popular VM hypervisor "VMWare ESXi" and the world of SBCs (single board computers) with processors based on ARM technology.

VMWare has just released a ARM version of their ESXi product for different ARM based computers among which the Raspberry Pi 4 can be found as one of the most wide spread and very popular SBCs with ARM technology.

Generally VMWare is planning to make their ESXi software and other products available for ARM. While VMWare is basically in a phase of testing they release this new product versions in their "Fling" programm. Fling can be compared to early access to new software like we know it from computer games on Steam and other services. Through Fling VMWare offers their new tools to developers and users to get feedback and improve their development.

Anyway. So to experience this new ARM ESXi you don't need to buy or rent a ARM based server. A Raspberry Pi or another ARM based SBC is enough . I highly recommend the latest Raspberry Pi with atleast 4GB RAM or more. A very important thing to note is that currently you can only create VMs based on the ARM architecture and for ARM supported OSs (mainly Linux distributions). Also remember that VMWare ESXi is not a free product. You can use ESXi ARM for 180 days.

Fun fact: Already in 2018 VMWare introduced ESXi for ARM but until now nothing has been released or reached the surface in terms of a usable product.

More infromation:
- https://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2020/10/...i-arm.html
- https://flings.vmware.com/esxi-arm-edition


Personally I think that this is a huge step forward. Since years we already have servers that use ARM processors with a lot cores. There are ARM CPUs that have like 64 cores and 128 threads. They support DDR4 and even PCIe 4.0. So getting to use VMWare ESXi on such great hardware is awesome. Especially to provide a new product "ARM VPSs". A really cool thing in my humble opinion.

Remember how Scaleways provided ARM dedicated servers? Now we can have ARM VPSs. They still can be used for many purposes even if the CPU architecture is not x86.