William Lam

ESXi Support for 2014 Apple Mac Mini 7,1

10.25.2014 by William Lam // 88 Comments

I have received a number of inquires asking whether ESXi can be installed on the latest 2014 Apple Mac Mini 7,1. Unfortunately, some early reports have indicated issues trying to get the latest version of ESXi installed on the Mac Mini and the results are also the same using old releases of ESXi as well. As of right now, VMware Engineering is unable to comment on the issue until they can get their hands on a the latest Mac Mini in house for investigation. If you happen to own the latest Mac Mini and live in the Bay Area and wish to help expedite the process by donating your system for testing, feel free to drop me a note. I will update this blog with new findings as they are made available regarding ESXi and the new Mac Mini's. The answer is yes, you can install the latest release of ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Patch03 and to be able to get the SATA HDD to show up, you will need to install a custom VIB shown below.

UPDATE 3 (11/7) - For those just wanting the latest ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Patch03 + SATA VIB ISO, I have created ESXi-5.5u2p03-MacMini-7-1-HDD.iso that you can just download and install.

UPDATE 2 (11/6) - Thanks to one of our CPD Engineers Charles Monnett, we now have a way for ESXi to detect the HDD located in the new Apple Mac Mini 7,1. It turns out there was a new SATA controller that is being used for the HDD and because it's PCI ID (8086:9c03) was unknown, it was not being claimed by the AHCI driver. Once this was added to the driver map files, ESXi could now see the second drive. Of course, I wanted to simplify this for end users, so I have built a new VIB called vghetto-apple-macmini71-hdd.vib that needs to be installed which can be done by using the following command:

esxcli software vib install -v /vghetto-apple-macmini71-hdd.vib -f

Once the VIB has been installed, go ahead reboot for the changes to take affect. We can now run the following command on the ESXi Shell to confirm that we now see both the SSD and HDD disk OR we can do so using the vSphere C# Client:

esxcli storage core device list

UPDATE 1 (11/5) - It looks like an internal team was able to get their hands on the latest Mac Mini 7,1 and using the latest ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Patch03 image, they were successfully able to install ESXi, however it only recognized the internal SSD (Samsung based) and not the Fusion drive. This will need to be further investigated on why the other device is not being claimed but it looks like as of now, you can at least get stock ESXi installed and use the SSD.

In the mean time, if you are looking to purchase a Mac Mini to run ESXi, I would highly recommend you take a look at some of the platform changes here and here before deciding to purchase. The most significant change in my opinion is the removal of user replaceable memory with soldered in memory! This means that you will NOT be able to upgrade the units after purchasing and you will need to max out the configuration during the initial purchase with Apple. This is one of the unfortunate changes to the Mac Mini platform and I personally would recommend looking at the last release of the Mac Mini's (Late 2012) which will provide the most bang for the buck. For the old Mac Mini's you will most likely have to look on eBay or even Amazon as they are no longer sold by Apple or their retailers.

Disclaimer: Running ESXi on an Apple Mac Mini is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk

A killer custom Apple Mac Mini setup running VSAN

10.21.2014 by William Lam // 12 Comments

*** This is a guest blog post from Peter Bjork ***

The first time I was briefed on VMware VSAN, I fell in love. I finally knew how I would build my Home Lab.

Let me first introduce myself, my name is Peter Björk and I work at VMware as Lead Specialist within the EMEA EUC Practice. I fortunately have the opportunity to limit my focus on a very few products and truly specialize in these. I cover two products; VMware ThinApp and VMware Workspace Portal and one feature; the Application Publishing feature of VMware Horizon 6. I’m an End-User application kind of guy. That said, you should understand that I’m far from your ESXi and vSphere expert. If you want to keep up with the latest news in the VMware End-User Computing space make sure to follow me on Twitter, my handle is @thepeb. When I’m not a guest blogger, I frequently blog on the official ThinApp and Horizon Tech blogs.

In my role I produce a lot of blog posts and internal enablement material. I perform many tests using early code drops and on a daily basis I run my home lab to deliver live demos. I need a Home Lab that I can trust and that supports all my work tasks. I started building my lab many years ago. It all started with a single mid tower white box, but pretty soon I ran into resource constraints. I started to investigate what my next upgrade would look like.

I had a few requirements:

Keep the noise down
Shouldn’t occupy that much space
Should be affordable
Modular, I do not have money to buy everything upfront so it should be something I could build on top of.
Should be able to run VMware ESXi/vSphere
Should be cool

[Read more...]

Apple Mac Pro 6,1 (black) officially supported on ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Patch03

10.16.2014 by William Lam // 44 Comments

The much anticipated support for running vSphere on the latest generation of the Apple Apple Mac Pro 6,1 (black) is finally here with the release of ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Patch03. Due to unforeseen issues, it has taken a bit longer than expected to get the Apple Mac Pro certified, but VMware Engineering has been working hard to get all the bugs fixed and triaged with Apple and you can now run the latest release of vSphere on the Apple Mac Pro 4-core, 6-core, 8-core & 12-core configuration. I also would like to point out that when the next release of vSphere (.NEXT) is available, the Apple Mac Pro will also be certified and supported.

UPDATE (10/31) - Take a look at this blog post here for detailed instructions on installing ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Patch03 on the Mac Pro 6,1.

You can find the ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Patch03 (ESXi550-201410001) download here using Image Builder to author and ISO image which is equired to install ESXi on the new Mac Pro.

The VMware HCL has also been updated to reflect this new update:

Note: The VMware HCL currently lists 5.5 U2 as the supported release, but you will specifically need ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Patch03 for this new hardware support. I am hoping to get this further clarified on the HCL.

Here is a screenshot of the latest ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Patch03 running on an Apple Mac Pro 8-Core system courtesy from VMware Engineering: