ESXi on Arm? Yes, ESXi on Arm. VMware teases bare-metal hypervisor for 64-bit Arm servers VMware today showed off a port of its bare-metal ESXi hypervisor for 64-bit Arm servers at its VMworld US shindig in Las Vegas. This morning's keynote audience briefly glimpsed vSphere Client managing a 64-bit Arm Cortex-A72-powered host that was running four virtual machines. The box apparently had four logical processors, …
IoT gateways, not “things”, and because there is no concrete produxt definition, it’s too early to talk licensing. Clearly it would be something different to fit the narrative. All things considered, without a cohesive way to deploy, manage, secure, monitor, make fault-proof and upgrade IoT analytics and control workloads at the edge, IoT deployments will not be mainstream.
a presentation from VMWare at the end of last week on their site, where they were discussing the pros and cons of using ARM architecture.
The overall impression I got from the slides was that ARM processors are still lacking a lot of stuff, when it comes to virtualization, the biggest being that there was little or no security on the processor caches, meaning segregating VMs and processes was difficult / VMs could in theory look into other VMs cache memory - think Spectre side channel attacks.
I don't know how old the document was, but either ARM have now solved that problem, or this is going to be stuck in niche markets, where the whole stack is controlled, until the virtualization segregation technology in ARM matures. (i.e. for edge devices that run a few VMs from the same manufacturer, with a defined software stack, but not for datacenters or multi-tenant cloud services).
You mean something like https://labs.vmware.com/download/68? That's old and irrelevant these days (sorry, Prashanth). This was from back in the 32-bit days and no virtualization extensions.
Arm virtualization for 64-bit Arm CPUs is comparable to what you see on current x86 cores in terms of the feature set and overheads incurred. The ARM Architecture Reference Manual (ARMv8-A architecture profile) is freely available, so you can see for yourself :-).
"What was therefore teased was an Arm64 device running four Arm-compatible guest operating systems and applications on a port of VMware's bare-metal hypervisor with fault tolerance"
You do realise that Fault Tolerance means something very specific in VMWare world. Its about running a live synchronised version of the VM on an alternate host in case of host failure (I've yet to run into this in the wiild). The article seems to imply a demo on a single host which wouldn't allow for that. It also doesn't allow for the lower level of fault tolerance, High Availability, which will move a VM to another available host in the event of host failure.
What was demo'd was a single host running 4 VMs, not anything at all either 'Fault Tolerant' or 'High Availablity'.
The keynote demo involved a cluster of two Arm edge gateways in a hypothetical Wind Farm scenario, with HA and DRS enabled. One VM was running with Fault Tolerance - which means live synchronization of the VM onto a secondary. The demo also showed vMotion working.
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