Apple – Page 24

Quick Update - ESXi support for Apple Mac Pro 6,1

07.18.2014 by William Lam // 3 Comments

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.

VMware Fusion Tech Preview 2 can now connect to ESXi & vCenter Server!

07.04.2014 by William Lam // 4 Comments

There was a lot of buzz this week on the announcement of the first vSphere Beta that is available for anyone to sign up for (still a private Beta with NDA rules), however one announcement that was probably missed is that the folks over on the VMware Fusion team just released their second Tech Preview of VMware Fusion (Build 1943533). Why is this such a big deal? Well, it includes one very exciting new feature that I have been asking for a awhile now, which is the ability to connect to an ESXi host or vCenter Server using VMware Fusion! VMware Workstation has had this feature for awhile now and I have been hoping the Fusion team would eventually implement something similar and It looks like they have finally answered 🙂

You now can connect either a Workstation, ESXi host or vCenter Server using VMware Fusion! If you are like me who primary uses a Mac and you do not want to run a single Windows VM just to be able to use the vSphere C# Client, you can now use VMware Fusion to connect to a vSphere system and perform some basic VM operations, which includes managing Virtual Hardware 10 VMs. You can even use this latest version to connect to the beta version of ESXi host.

Under the File menu, there is now a new option called "Connect to Server" or you can use Command+K for keyboard shortcut.

Here is a screenshot of connecting to a Mac Mini running ESXi 5.5:

Here is screenshot of connecting to one of my remote vCenter Servers:

As you can see this is a super handy feature and you can also have multiple connections to various vCenter Servers, ESXi hosts including Free ESXi! This alone is worth grabbing the latest Tech Preview of VMware Fusion! I can not wait for this feature to be officially released with VMware Fusion, this is going to be a must have feature for any VMware/Apple user!

If you have any feedback on this particular feature or others, please leave a comment on the VMware Fusion Tech Preview community forums!

Useful Links - Installing Mac OS X in a VM & P2V'ing Mac OS X

03.10.2014 by William Lam // 1 Comment

A couple of weeks back I received an interesting email regarding a couple of topics related to Apple Mac OS X and vSphere. The first one was related to the steps required for installing Mac OS X in a Virtual Machine. Though the process for installing Mac OS X in a Virtual Machine is pretty straight forward, there is an additional step that you must preform before you can get started. This was actually something I ran into when I first tried to install Mac OS X in a Virtual Machine. I found this handy online resource by VMware called Guest Operating System Installation Guide that provides the exact steps required and you will find a link for each of the supported Mac OS X systems as shown in the list below.

Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks)
Mac OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion)
Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion)
Mac OS X Server 10.6 (Snow Leopard)
Mac OS X Server 10.5 (Leopard)

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