I’ve just got an RPI4 8GB and have had the latest ESXI 7.0 built onto it. The ESXI works fine to install debian/centos, so believe ESXI is OK.
However, when I am trying to install below Manjaro image and boot as “Datastore ISO file” of ESXI virtual CD/DVD, it fails and reporting to load from PXE devices over IPV4 and IPV6 and then return back to ESXI BIOS. In the end, the image cannot be loaded.
The message I see is “Start PXE over IPv4”, then “Start PXE over IPv6”, it doesn’t load the Manjaro image from the virtual CD/DVD, and even not when I adjust boot order of CD/DVD device over network devices in ESXI BIOS.
May I know how do you guys install Manjaro on ESXI on RPI4 please.
Manjaro ARM images are not ISO, they are a disk image with a bootable FAT32 partition and an ext4 rootfs partition. Use dd or a similar tool to write the image to a (SD/SSD) drive, or a virtual disk in your case. There is no installation process, just a first boot setup.
Thanks @0n0w1c , manjaro will be a esxi guest os on rpi4 and I can convert the manjaro image file into virtual disk file, e.g., vmdk,
However, I cannot quite understand if the manjaro image contains bootable FAT32 partition, why the converted vmdk cannot be booted by itself under ESXi?
It sounds I would need a bootloader to load the vmdk file instead, or any other way you would recommend?
I am not very familiar with ESXi, does it have a true RPi VM? Or is it simply an ARM VM?
RPi4 images include the raspberry pi bootloader. For ESXi, I would expect you will need to use the UEFI bootloader (and optionally add grub2). For UEFI, see this link. I was successful creating an image that booted on an x86_64 KVM host, it should work for ESXi too.
I believe you hit a known issue with recent rpi4 kernels + uefi. Not sure when this bug will be resolved. Switch to the linux or linux-rc (generic) kernels, they boot fine with uefi. You can even use them on a rpi4, you only lose the headphone jack and v3d. All other rpi4 hardware works. I doubt you will have v3d or headphone jack on a VM anyway.