I've got ESXi working on several other OS, but I can't get Sierra to work for the life of me. It'll boot, and get to the screen where I need to choose an install drive, but all it sees is the 'DVD' it booted from. Then I saw an article that guided you through installing OS X 10.10 on VMWare Fusion by first downgrading the OS Selection from 10.10 to 10.9, then changing the compatibility to use Hardware Version 10 from 11, so that you could later upload the newly created VM to your ESXi 5.5 Server, and make a few modification including adding back in the.
As a Mac Sysadmin you learn early on that sometimes you have to do strange and terrible things to the machines you look after at the behest of your users. Being a lifelong Mac Geek I’ve spent a fair amount of time fiddling in the guts of Macs and doing all sorts of strange Mac Wizardry. When my users asked for new Mac OS VMs to test Xcode for teams, I jumped at the chance to build ESXI hosts. Since it’s a bit tricky, and the latest and most complete documentation I found was from 2012, I decided to document the process. Turning current-gen Mac Minis into ESXI vSphere hosts isn’t the strangest thing you’re ever going to do, but be warned: the route I took does void the AppleCare warranty included with the computer. Who needs Mac VMs anyways? Or, why the heck did I do this?
New Relic’s Portland office is our Intergalactic Engineering HQ, and as such the engineers need to have a variety of different OS virtual machines. Also, as our entire office runs on Mac laptops we also need to have environments that can run for extended or indefinite time periods. The most notable of the engineering groups who need long-running Mac environments is our team, which needs them to compile our iOS apps. They were the department that initially approached me about getting multiple Mac OS environments set up, and have benefited the most from the transition to ESXI vSphere hosted VMs. Note: If you’re here for assistance on getting ESXI up and running on your own Mini, please skip to step 7 of “Loading ESXI vSphere” for directions on getting past the Pink Screen of Death. In a follow-up post I’ll cover some of the imaging caveats for Mac OS VMs. General benefits of using Mac Minis, especially with ESXI So, you might be wondering, why on earth would someone strip the OS off of a Mac Mini and install ESXI on it.
![Mac Os X Unlocker For Vmware Esxi 5.5 Mac Os X Unlocker For Vmware Esxi 5.5](https://www.tactig.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Ready-to-install.jpg)
Well, there are several reasons:. Mac Minis are the only “server” Macs available. XServes, and the older sliver tower Mac Pros aren’t being produced, and haven’t been in several years. The new Mac Pro isn’t designed to run as a headless server—it’s targeted at high end graphics and video editing. Mac Minis are, relatively speaking, cheap. The Server model costs $999 without any upgrades. Compare that to the price of the older Mac Pros and the XServes of yore, and they’re a steal.
Mac Minis are easy to add to server racks. With a you get two Minis per 1U in a server rack. You can isolate services. Need Netboot, Profile Manager, and Caching Server? You can block services off in their own instance of OS X in VSphere.
If one service goes down you can reboot that VM and not affect the rest. Need to upgrade to a the latest point revision of Mac OS X?
Take a snapshot of your VM, run the update, and if things break no big deal—just roll back to the last snapshot. Convinced you yet? If so, read on to find out exactly how you can do it yourself.
This post is outdated! One of the main reason for me to use ESXi instead of other hypervisors such as Hyper-V is the broad amount of different operating systems it supports. Not only is it able to run Windows and Linux, but I’ve been running Mac OS X and even Android for quite some time with great result. In this tutorial I’ll cover how to install Mac OS X on ESXi 5.5 or 6.0. Prerequisites You will need a server running ESXi 5.5 or 6.0 (obviously). I haven’t made a guide on installing it yet, but I might do that as well in the upcoming days. Meanwhile there are a lot of guides all over the web and the installation itself is actually much simpler then most.
You will also need a real mac in order to download and convert the Yosemite installation disk. Prepare ESXi for running Apple OS X operating systems ESXi doesn’t support OS X out of the box. The first thing you will have to do is to download a unlocker tool from insanelymac.com. If you have ESXi 5.5, or if you are running 6.0 as I am,.
Please note that you will need to register on the site in order to download these files. In order to install the unlocker tool follow these instructions:. You need to enable SSH on your ESXi host.
![Mac Os X Unlocker For Vmware Esxi 5.5 Mac Os X Unlocker For Vmware Esxi 5.5](https://tickett.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/282bec93-8863-4e6d-a43a-5399cb618291.png)
In order to do that, login to your host using the VMware vShpere Client and navigate to Configuration-Security Profile. From here click on Properties in the upper right corner where it says Services. The dialog Services Properties should appear and from here you can click on SSH-Options and choose Start and stop with host. Click Start and then close all the open dialogs. Depending on your operating system, you will need to download or another SCP-client in order to transfer the unlocker-files. Make sure you extract the files somewhere on your client and connect to your ESXi host using the IP-address and the user root. Once connected navigate to / vmfs / volumes / datastore01 /, replacing datastore01 with your actual datastore name. Create a new folder called tools and transfer your unlockerXXX directory.
Now cd into the uploaded directory and ensure the ESXi scripts have execute permissions by running chmod + x esxi - install. Sh and chmod + x esxi - uninstall. / esxi - install. Sh in order to install the unlocker. Reboot your ESXi host Note: 1. Any changes you have made to local.sh will be lost.
If you have made changes to that file, you will need to merge them into the supplied local.sh file. The unlocker runs at boot time to patch the relevant files and it now survives an upgrade or patch to ESXi as local.sh is part of the persisted local state. Mv / tmp / Yosemite. Cdr / Desktop / Yosemite. Iso Now ensure that the scripts has execute permissions by running chmod + x yosemite.
Sh and run with sh. This will take some time, so just be patient. Once done it should have created a file called Yosemite.iso on your desktop. Create a virtual Mac OS X VM The next step should be fairly simple if you have used ESXi before.
As usual open your datastore and transfer the iso to wherever you normally store your installation files. Then create a new vm, select Typical and you should be able to select Other and then Apple Mac OS X 10.10 (64-bit). Complete the wizard, mount the ISO and install Mac OS X as usual. Please note that you must format the hard drive using the disk utility before it will be visible in the install wizard. Configure Mac OS X It’s very important to install the VMware Tools as soon as possible after the install has finished. Without it Mac OS X might not awake from sleep and in general be very unreliable.
I also recommend to turn off sleep and the screensaver in settings as these may cause issues. Especially the screen saver takes up quite a lot of resources. Known issues The only known issue so far is that the virtual machine is stuck with a low resolution of 1024 x 768 unless you add a GPU to your server and use pass-through mode. I haven’t tested it, but it should work according to other users. If anyone figures out another workaround for this issue, please share it! There’s now a way to overcome the resolution limitation using.