Whilst playing about with the latest release of the ESXi for ARM Fling on a handy Raspberry Pi, I managed to waste a good few hours before I discovered that both the 22.04 and 23.10 releases of Ubuntu Server for ARM now require more than 1GB of memory to install without the installer crashing.

The symptoms were the same in both cases; at a random point the installer would either hang or – somehow – manage to pop up the crash reporter dialogue. And it would do this with no simple indication of why this would occur.

My mistake turned out to be my use of the ‘Ubuntu’ template that ESXi for Arm offers. A quick bump of the template’s allocated memory from 1GB to 2GB and the install flies through every time.

In better new, Ubuntu Server now installs the ARM build of ‘open-vm-tools‘ by default and so removes the need to faff around with building your own copy!