Preparation

Setup involves ensuring Raspberry Pi microcode (e.g. for USB) is up-to-date, deploying the UEFI firmware and preparing the installer USB drive.

Step 1: Ensure Raspberry Pi EEPROM is updated

• On a working Raspberry OS run ...

Step 2: Prepare SD card

• Format SD card with a single FAT32 (MSDOS) partition

• Download the latest official Raspberry Pi Firmware ...
  https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/archive/master.zip
  ... and extract the contents (should be a folder called firmware-master)

• Delete all files starting with kernel*.img within firmware-master/boot directory

• Copy the entire content of the "boot" directory onto the newly formatted SD card:

This corresponds to the microcode necessary to initialize the Raspberry Pi.

• Download the latest community Raspberry Pi 4 UEFI firmware ...
  https://github.com/pftf/RPi4/releases
  ... and extract the contents (should be a folder called RPi4_UEFI_Firmware_v1.xx)

• Copy all files within the RPi4_UEFI_Firmware_v1.xx directory into the same boot directory  on SD card
  (confirm override of files when prompted)

This is the firmware necessary to boot ESXi-Arm.

• 4GB Pi 4 only
  Edit the config.txt file on the SD Card and append gpu_mem=16

• Eject the SD Card and then put the SD card into the Pi.

Step 3: Download ESXi on Arm Fling

• You need a My VMware (https://my.vmware.com) account, which you can register for free.

• Download PDF files the ESXi-Arm team has created with easy to follow, step-by-step instructions.
  - ESXi-Arm-Fling-Doc.pdf
  - Fling-on-Raspberry-Pi.pdf
  - ESXi-Arm-ISO file
  https://flings.vmware.com/esxi-arm-edition

• 
  

Raspberry Pi OS as a VM on ESXi-Arm

What you need:

• 7Zip (or other app that can handle .xy compressed files)

• Qemu-img (or other app that can handle and convert virtual disk files)

• ssh client to connect to ESXI-Arm

Create new VM

Download desired OS
https://www.raspberrypi.com/software/operating-systems/

Unpack .img file from .XY file with 7Zip

Convert .img file to VMDK file with qemu-img

Transfer VMDK file to new VM storage location with ESXi-Manager Webgui

Convert the VMDK one more time so ESXi understands it.
The qemu-img utility only converts it to a hosted format which is normally used by Workstation/Fusion.
We use vmkfstools.
You need to SSH (SSH is disabled by default) to the ESXi-Arm host after SCP'ing the VMDK and then run this command from ESXi-Arm host:

After the conversion completes, you can delete the source VMDK.

• VMware Tools for Debian 10 arm64 on ESXi-Arm
  https://www.virten.net/2020/10/vmware-tools-for-debian-10-arm64-on-esxi-arm/

• 
  

ESXi ARM on CM4

Hardware:  

Board: CM4-IO-Base-B 

https://www.waveshare.com/wiki/CM4-IO-BASE-B

RPi: CM4 8GB