This is all enabled by ESXi running on the SmartNIC, specifically on Arm-based SmartNICs. This can deliver some powerful use cases: improved network performance, zero-trust security, storage acceleration, bare metal support in vSphere (!!), and hardware disaggregation through composability. In particular, Project Monterey adds SmartNIC support to VMware Cloud Foundation. It’s a rethinking of the hardware architecture underlying VMware Cloud Foundation. We announced Project Monterey last week at VMworld. So, we kicked off a project to implement that: Project Monterey. As we talked with customers and partners, one use case that quickly rose to the top was running ESXi on the Arm processor on a SmartNIC. Over the past several years, you’ve seen us demonstrate a number of different use cases at VMworld: mission critical workloads on a wind turbines, running a cluster of ESXi hosts on a single physical server using SmartNICs, vSAN storage servers and witness appliances, and running on AWS Graviton in the cloud. We even collaborated on drivers.īeyond the technical challenges, we have explored the use cases for using Arm processors. This work included extending hardware standards, firmware standards, and certification beyond the existing Arm server ecosystem, which enabled us to support platforms like SmartNICs and the ubiquitous Raspberry Pi. We worked closely with Arm through their Project Cassini to get ESXi-Arm up and running across a wide range of devices to cover data center, edge compute and beyond. This required careful testing and modification to ensure ESXi ran on both Arm and x86 platforms while maintaining ESXi’s high standards. Not only is ESXi a large codebase, with many technical subtleties, but the underlying semantics of Arm processors are quite different than x86. However, a few years ago, a small team of Arm experts at VMware started working on porting ESXi to Arm. Traditionally, ESXi was designed for x86 compute virtualization. ESXi-ArmĪs the name suggests, ESXi-Arm is a version of ESXi built to run on 64-bit Arm processors. So what is ESXi-Arm? And what is a Fling? And what is the goal with all this? There’s lots to unpack here, so let’s dive right in.
Today is an exciting day for us at VMware and I expect for many of you reading this post: the ESXi bits that run on Arm are now available for you to download and start playing with! Specifically, we’re excited to release the ESXi-Arm Fling.
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