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vSphere 6.7 Update 2 add support back for Apple Mac Pro 6,1

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Last fall, support for vSphere 6.7 Update 1 on the Apple Mac Pro 6,1 was removed by VMware after finding out an updated version of the Apple Firmware prevented ESXi from booting up properly after upgrading. After some investigation and troubleshooting with several customers, VMware Engineering found a solution to workaround the problem and that fix is included in the latest vSphere 6.7 Update 2 release. As mentioned in the original blog post, this could also impact Apple Mac Mini's, which are not officially supported by VMware, but the fix should also apply to the Mac Mini.

In addition, the VMware HCL will also be updated shortly to reflect support for both vSphere 6.7 Update 2 along with the existing vSphere 6.7 support. For customers that have been waiting for features in vSphere 6.7 Update 1, you can finally upgrade to the latest release to get all the new features and benefits of vSphere.

Aquantia 10GbE ESXi Driver for Apple 2018 Mac Mini

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I know many of you have been anxiously waiting for ESXi to be fully functional on the latest Apple Mac Mini (2018), unfortunately I do not have any news to share with you on that front. Without help from Apple, we are still challenged with Apple's new T2 chip, which prevents us from accessing the underlying NVMe device.

UPDATE (04/27/20) - Marvell (formally Aquantia) has just released an official Native ESXi Driver for their AQtion based network adaptors which you can find here and for the complete list of supported devices using this driver, please refer to the VMware HCL here.

Having said that, I do have some exciting news regarding the built-in 10Gigabit Ethernet adaptor on the 2018 Mac Mini. The 10GbE adaptor uses an Aquantia chipset, this is also the same chipset used in Apple's high end iMac Pro which was released earlier in the year. Over the past few weeks, I have been working with the Aquantia team and they have successfully ported over their open source Atlantic driver to a VMKlinux driver for ESXi, which they have published here. Although the local NVMe device can not be used to run any VMs, with the network fully enabled, customers could take advantage of this model and connect to IP-based storage to start leveraging the new Mac Mini platform.

The easiest way to incorporate the driver into the latest ESXi release is to use Image Builder within the vSphere H5 Client UI, below are the step-by-step instructions.

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ESXTOP and VMware Cloud on AWS

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ESXTOP is one of the most versatile and popular tool in the VI Administrators tool belt when it comes to real time performance analysis and data collection in a vSphere environment. In fact, ESXTOP also came up in the most recent episode of the VirtuallySpeaking Podcast covering the Top 10 Tools for VI Administrators, which Duncan Epping and I had the pleasure to be part of.

To use ESXTOP, you are required to SSH to an ESXi host as it is only available in the ESXi Shell. Traditionally, this has not been a huge issue for on-premises environment, especially as you can enable access when you needed to run ESXTOP. However, when operating on VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC), customers no longer have to worry about managing the underlying infrastructure and can now focus on being a consumer of the VMware SDDC. One side affect of this operational change is that customers do not have direct access to ESXi and would not be able to use ESXTOP.

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