I know many of you have been asking about ESXi support for the latest Mac Pro 6,1 that was released from Apple late last year and I just wanted to give a quick update. VMware Engineering has been hard at work on getting this new platform certified and supported with ESXi, however, there were some unforeseen challenges that is currently preventing the current version of ESXi to run on the new Mac Pro.
VMware is working closely with Apple's hardware team to resolve these issues and we expect to have a Mac Pro 6,1 supported with ESXi 5.5 in the future. In the meantime, if you wish to evaluate ESXi on the new Mac Pro (though not officially supported), you can sign up for the new vSphere Beta and run a Beta version of ESXi on the new Mac Pro.
Here is a screenshot of Mac Pro 6,1 running the Beta version of ESXi:
There are a couple of workarounds that is required for right now, which will all be resolved by GA. For more details, please refer to this VMTN thread.
As the new Mac pro is completely closed for adding new hardware then we will need to have a 10Gb thunderbolt, will it be taken into consideration
Hi William,
Thanks for the update, but can you share of the ESXi update on the Mac Pro 6.1 works with external drives like a SAN or NAS attached to the Mac Pro 6.1. Earlier it was not detecting the extremal drives.
Regards,
AJ
Do you know when or how we can try out the beta? I have a Mac Pro 6,1 just purchased a few days ago and any version I try does not recognize the internal storage. Willing to test or try out anything!