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You are here: Home / ESXi 5.1 Officially Certified on Apple Mac Pro

ESXi 5.1 Officially Certified on Apple Mac Pro

09.12.2012 by William Lam // 5 Comments

If you are still trying to catch up with all the awesomeness that has been shared, blogged, tweeted, etc. about in the last 24hrs with the announcement of the new vCloud Suite 5.1 release, here is one additional tidbit to add to that list which you might not have heard about it. With the release of ESXi 5.1, the Apple Mac Pro is now officially supported!

I came across this little tidbit from some folks internally who have been working hard to get the Mac Pro platform certified and supported on ESXi. After the vCloud Suite went live, I did a quick search on the VMware HCL and sure enough, the Apple Mac Pro was listed with support for ESXi 5.1.

If you recall back when vSphere 5.0 was released, VMware introduced support for ESXi to run on Apple's XServe ... unfortunately, Apple had decided to announce it's EOL (End of Life) several months prior which made it difficult to purchase and rely on the XServe as a platform. The only way you could get your hands on an XServe is if you were one of the few who purchased them before the EOL date (I personally went through this) or you were willing to look on Ebay. Luckily, now with the latest release of ESXi 5.1, if you need to virtualize Mac OSX Server Virtual Machines and other guestOSes, you can do so using the Apple Mac Pro.

More from my site

  • Running ESXi 5.0 & 5.1 on 2012 Mac Mini 6,2
  • Aquantia/Marvell AQtion (Atlantic) driver now inbox in ESXi 7.0 Update 2
  • Apple NVMe driver for ESXi using new Community NVMe Driver for ESXi Fling 
  • GPU passthrough with ESXi on the Apple 2019 Mac Pro 7,1
  • Virtually Speaking Podcast: MacOS Virtualization and MacStadium

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // apple, ESXi 5.1, mac pro, vSphere 5.1, xserve

Comments

  1. *protectedAnonymous says

    09/17/2012 at 8:22 pm

    I'm still bummed the Mac Mini isn't officially supported. 🙁

    Reply
    • *protectedWilliam says

      09/17/2012 at 8:36 pm

      @Anonymous,

      ESXi requires the use of ECC memory, until Apple decides to provide support for ECC memory, I don't see Mini getting certified. If you would like to see Mini get on the HCL, you can help by writing a letter to Apple 🙂

      Reply
    • *protectedUnknown says

      12/27/2013 at 12:06 am

      So does this mean you can't legally run it, or you physically can't run Mac VM's on a MacMini? I'm in the process of going through this, so I'm currently working on attempting this.

      Reply
    • *protectedUnknown says

      12/30/2013 at 5:56 pm

      It just means it's not on the HCL list from VMwares perspective. You can physically install/run ESXi 5.x on a MacMini. I am doing so in my home lab environment and it is working great. I honestly can't imagine using Apple/Mac hardware for anything other than a lab/test environment even on Apple qualified hardware.

      Reply

Trackbacks

  1. When Can I Run Apple OSX on vSphere 5? | virtuallyGhetto says:
    03/02/2014 at 7:43 pm

    […] 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. […]

    Reply

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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