In my setup, I am MacOS and you can install qemu-img using brew. You will also need about ~10GB of free storage for the converted file format. Step 1 - You need access to a system that has the qemu-img utility installed.

If you want to run Kali 2021.1 on you can just download the ISOs 'For Apple M1', it will work out-of-the-box 😲 VMware Tools can also be installed on Kali Linux, for detailed instructions, please see this blog post. You can now install Kali without having to go through this process and the steps below are no longer applicable. As of 02/24/21, Kali has released an ISO version of Kali Linux 2021.4 which is for the Apple M1, but it also works on ESXi-Arm as shared by one of our ESXi-Arm Engineers. UPDATE (03/29/21):At the time of writing this blog post, Kali 2020.4 was the latest version and these instructions have been verified using that version. With the help of Cyprien Laplace, we can now run Kali Linux on ESXi-Arm! You can find the detailed instructions below including installing VMware Tools for Kali Linux running on ESXi-Arm.

However, there is an issue when attempting to install grub during Step 16 where it can not locate an EFI partition. Similiar to Raspberry Pi OS, the techniques outlined in this blog post can be used to convert the image-based system to a Virtual Machine that ESXi-Arm can then run natively. A few folks have been trying to get Kali Linux, a Debian-derived Linux distribution designed for digital forensics and penetration testing, to run on ESXi-Arm.

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