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GPU passthrough with ESXi on the Apple 2019 Mac Pro 7,1

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The expandability of the Apple 2019 Mac Pro (7,1) has been the primary reason VMware customers have been so excited for this new platform for virtualizing macOS on ESXi. The most common request that I hear from customers is for GPU passthrough.

Although VMware does not officially support GPU passthrough, even for the existing Apple hardware systems on the VMware HCL, this has been a topic I have been keeping an eye out on, especially from what the VMware community is doing in this space.

My intention for this blog post is to provide a resource for the community on capturing the success and failures when attempting GPU passthrough on a 2019 Mac Pro. For those interested and have capable hardware, you may want to start with the VMware HCL for GPU passthrough devices listed under Virtual Dedicated Graphics Acceleration (vDGA). This may be your best chance to successfully passthrough a GPU that will be recognized by either a macOS or Linux/Windows guest operating system.

If you would like to share your experiences, feel free to leave a comment or reach out by filling the contact form.

Disclaimer: Although ESXi installs and runs on the Apple 2019 Mac Pro 7,1 it is currently not certified on the VMware HCL. There are no timelines on the certification due to challenges with COVID-19.

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Quick Tip - How to use Apple Thunderbolt 2 ethernet adapter with ESXi 7.0 or greater

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I was doing some testing on my Apple 2018 Mac Mini with the latest ESXi 7.0 Update 1 release and I needed to setup a separate network connection as the onboard 10GbE was not working for me initially. I was out of ideas but I did remember that I still have my Apple Thunderbolt 2 to gigabit ethernet adapter which was something I had used quite a bit in the early days when I was using the Apple Mac Mini as my homelab system.

Like all recent Apple Mac's, the 2018 Mac Mini only supports Thunderbolt 3 (USB-C) ports and obviously not compatibility with the network adapter. Luckily, I did have an official Apple Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt 2 adapter lying around which would allow me to connect the network adapter to the Mac Mini and to my surprise, it was automatically detected by the latest release of ESXi!


This partially came in a surprise because the Apple network adapter uses the Broadcom tg3 driver and I was not 100% sure if the native Broadcom (ntg3) would automatically claim this device since it was never officially supported.


Its definitely good to know this ethernet adapter still works as long as you have a TB2 to TB3 converter adapter and this should also work for any Intel NUC that have Thunderbolt 3 ports.

Passthrough of Integrated GPU (iGPU) for Apple Mac Mini 2018

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After successfully enabling and persisting the passthrough of the iGPU for the latest Intel NUC 10 (Frost Canyon), I thought it was worth experimenting with the Apple Mac Mini 2018 to see if the same could be accomplished with its iGPU, which is an Intel UHD 630. The biggest benefit in addition to unlocking the iGPU for general use is support for Apple's Metal API which gives developers access to the underlying GPU when building and testing MacOS and iOS applications. This is also quite timely as the Apple Mac Mini 2018 was just added to the VMware HCL!

My initial attempt failed when using the latest ESXi 6.7 Update 3 release. After enabling passthrough of the iGPU and rebooting the ESXi host for the change to take affect, the system would get stuck during boot up when loading the dma_iommu_mapper module. After speaking with Engineering, the issue is probably not related to dma_iommu_mapper module but some other module shortly after but without serial console output or ability to see terminal screen, it would be very difficult to debug the issue.

About to give up, my last attempt was try ESXi 7.0 and to my surprise the ESXi host fully booted up after enabling passthrough of the iGPU. It is still not clear on what might be causing the problem for 6.7 but at least 7.0 works!

Note: To be able to successfully power on a MacOS VM running on ESXi 7.0, ensure you have applied the recent ESXi 7.0b patch. You will need to go to the VMware Patch Portal siteto download and apply the update.

Step 1- Enable passthrough of the iGPU using the vSphere UI and then reboot for changes to take affect.

Step 2 - Navigate to Configure->Hardware->Graphics->Host Graphics and change the default graphics type to "Shared Direct"

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