When I heard at VMworld 2020 there was a fling for ESXi on ARM I was very excited. I have several Raspberry Pis deployed for various functions around the house so I thought this would be the perfect excuse to buy a shiny new 8GB Raspberry Pi4.

The documentation flings.vmware.com/esxi-arm-edition was great, however, I ran into two issues….

The Raspberry Pi 4 does not play nicely with all HDMI monitors

I couldn’t see any video while the Pi was booting up. I tried two different monitors and that didn’t help. The fix was adding the following line to the config.txt file on the root of the SD card

hdmi_safe=1

Don’t be tempted to use a cheap USB drive for the ESXi install media

The install media is less than 1GB, so I thought I would use one of the many small USB drives that vendors hand out like candy. This led to getting I/O errors and the install failing. I tried another no-name brand USB drive and the same thing happened. I finally tried a Kingston USB drive and the install completed.