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You are here: Home / Uncategorized / When Can I Run Apple OSX on vSphere 5?

When Can I Run Apple OSX on vSphere 5?

08.12.2011 by William Lam // 9 Comments

There was a recent post from the famous Scott Drummonds about Running Apple OSX Lion on vSphere 5 and Scott provided his interpretation/opinion of Apple's EULA on virtualizing Apple OSX. Though the EULA can be somewhat confusing, it is true that with the release of vSphere 5, you now can run OSX 10.7 (Lion), 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and 10.5 (Leopard) as a supported guestOS in ESXi 5.

...but there is a catch (there's always a catch)

UPDATE: As of vSphere 5.1, the Apple Mac Pro is now fully supported on running on ESXi 5.1, to get more details, please take a look at this article.

The caveat is that in allowing VMware to run OSX as a virtual machine on vSphere 5, the physical hardware that ESXi 5 is running on MUST be Apple hardware and specifically the XServe 3.1. For those of you who do not follow Apple's hardware closely, the XServe line was recently EOL as of January 31, 2011 and that brings up an interesting problem. If you wanted to virtualize Apple OSX, you would have had to have purchased XServes prior to January 31st or start looking on Ebay with your corporate card 😉

Now, the Apple EULA is not the only thing that is regulating this requirement, in addition, VMware had to implement a software check within ESXi 5 to ensure that the physical hardware is in fact Apple hardware before allowing you to properly boot up an OSX virtual machine. The check looks for the SMC (System Management Controller) when an OSX virtual machine is being powered on and if this check fails, you will get an error and the virtual machine will be powered off automatically. The presence of the SMC is a new property that is exposed in the vSphere 5 API under "hardware" section of the ESXi host.

The property will either return true or false on whether SMC is present. You can easily check your ESXi 5 host by using the vSphere MOB and pointing your browser to the following URL:

https://[esxi5-hostname]/mob/?moid=ha-host&doPath=hardware


Now you can easily determine whether or not your physical host can support running Apple OSX VMs.

As I understand from the beta, only XServer 3.1 will be officially supported and you will not be able to install ESXi 5 on older versions of the hardware. I have also heard mixed results on folks being able to install ESXi 5 on Mac Mini's and Mac Pro's. At this point, hopefully Apple has a change of heart and will update their EULA to allow ESXi 5 to run on "currently available" Apple hardware such as Mac Mini and Mac Pro.

More from my site

  • Running ESXi 5.0 & 5.1 on 2012 Mac Mini 6,2
  • That's so cool! Running ESXi 5.0 & 5.1 on Apple Mac Mini
  • VMware Tools For Apple Mac OS X Guests?
  • Installing ESXi 5.1 Update 1 on Mac Mini is Now a Breeze! (No Custom ISO/patches Needed!)
  • Installing ESXi 5.0 Update 2 on Mac Mini is Now a Breeze! (No Custom ISO/patches Needed!)

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // esxi5, mac, osx, vSphere 5.0

Comments

  1. Pascal says

    08/26/2011 at 12:48 pm

    Can't this 'smcPresent' value be 'overriden' by some kind of change in the .vmx file? It would be silly to implement support for OSX but limit it to EOL hardware ...

    Reply
  2. William says

    08/26/2011 at 2:26 pm

    @Pascal,

    Not sure if you read through the article thoroughly, but restriction is implemented by VMware to adhere to Apple's EULA. Get Apple to change their mind and this can easily be removed by VMware

    Reply
  3. Anonymous says

    10/05/2012 at 8:03 pm

    FYI it looks like now supports the MacPro 5.1

    http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php

    Reply
    • William says

      10/05/2012 at 8:13 pm

      Yes, I recently wrote about that here - http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2012/09/esxi-51-officially-certified-on-apple.html

      Reply
  4. John says

    07/12/2014 at 11:52 pm

    Hi,

    On my Mac Mini (using ESXi 5.5) I see:

    smcPresent boolean true

    This is very cool. I must try to install OSX in a guest again. I have found your website very useful. Also thanks for the VIB for the thunderbolt NIC. Again very useful.

    Thanks, John

    Reply
  5. Dave says

    11/20/2014 at 4:27 pm

    I have recently purchased a new Mac Mini within the last year. Does this mean that I would be unable to install ESXi and then run OSX on top of it? Or have they changed their minds on the licensing?

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. That’s so cool! Running ESXi 5.0 & 5.1 on Apple Mac Mini | virtuallyGhetto says:
    03/02/2014 at 6:12 pm

    […] you are running ESXi on Apple hardware, you can also create Mac OSX Virtual Machines (10.5 Server and 10.6 Server) and with the latest […]

    Reply
  2. Rupert Bryant-Greene | Systems Engineer, Technologist, Musician says:
    10/21/2015 at 3:00 am

    […] The process is well documented in William Lam's personal blog virtuallyGhetto. At the time of writing, William is working in R&D at VMWare, hence his blog is a wealth of information on VMWare implementations. He covers building ESXi images (including supplying some pre-builds), compatibility of new releases and even further details on Apple's licensing terms for virtualisation. […]

    Reply
  3. vSphere ESXi 7.x will be last version to officially support Apple macOS Virtualization says:
    08/03/2022 at 6:08 am

    […] As a heads up, I just wanted to share that VMware has just published a new knowledge base article to communicate that ESXi 7.x will be the last major release to officially support Apple macOS Virtualization, which was originally introduced back in 2011 with the release of vSphere 5.0. […]

    Reply

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William Lam is a Senior Staff Solution Architect working in the VMware Cloud team within the Cloud Infrastructure Business Group (CIBG) at VMware. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies, Automation, Integration and Operation for the VMware Cloud based Software Defined Datacenters (SDDC)

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