ESXi – Page 92

ESXi 6.5 support for Apple Mac Pro 6,1

01.09.2017 by William Lam // 56 Comments

I know several of you have reached out asking about the support for ESXi 6.5 on the Apple Mac Pro 6,1 but as of right now, the Mac Pro 6,1 is currently not supported with ESXi 6.5. I know this is not ideal especially for customers who wish to take advantage of the latest vSphere release. The good news is that VMware is in the process of testing the Apple Mac Pro 6,1 for ESXi 6.5, however there is not an ETA on when this will be completed by.

Some of you might be wondering why this did not happen earlier? The primary reason is that hardware certification for ESXi is actually performed by the hardware vendors. Once a vendor completes the certification for a particular hardware platform or component, they submit the results to VMware and the VMware HCL is updated. If there is a piece of hardware that is not on the VMware HCL today, it is definitely worth reaching out to your hardware vendor to inquire about its status.

In Apple's case, it unfortunate as they do not participate in VMware's Hardware Certification program for ESXi which makes certification challenging. VMware intends to continue to support customers who require the use of Mac OS X Virtualization and will work towards getting the Mac Pro's certified for latest version of vSphere as mentioned earlier. Historically, testing and certifying ESXi for Apple hardware does take an additional amount of time and in some cases, code changes may even be required due to unexpected hardware changes from Apple.

I hope this gives customers some additional insights into how Apple hardware is certified for ESXi. If you would like to see this improved in the future, you may want to reach out to Apple and provide them with your feedback.

Now ... before you close this blog post thinking it is going to take awhile before there is going to be an update regarding ESXi 6.5 and Mac Pro 6,1, please continue reading further 🙂

UPDATE (07/28/2017) - ESXi 6.5 Update 1 just GA'ed yesterday and is fully supported with all current Apple Mac Pro 6,1 (as you can see on the HCL here) and the workaround mentioned below is no longer required. This means you can install ESXi without any modification to the image.

UPDATE (03/25/2017) - VMware has just published the following VMware KB 2149537 which outlines the officially recommended workaround to install ESXi 6.5 onto the Apple Mac Pro 6,1. The VMware HCL has also been updated to include the Apple Mac Pro 6,1 4-Core, 6-Core, 8-Core & 12-Core systems. In a future release of ESXi, the workaround will not be required and ESXi will just install out of the box. This temporarily workaround is to enable customers who wish to run the current version of ESXi 6.5 which includes GA release, 6.5a and 6.5p01.

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Custom script bundle is now possible with Auto Deploy in vSphere 6.5

11.23.2016 by William Lam // 10 Comments

It has been some time since I had looked at the Auto Deploy and Host Profile feature in vSphere. As a former customer, I still remember one of the challenges I had in evaluating Auto Deploy and specifically Host Profiles was the fact that it did not cover all the possible ESXi configurations. This made it very difficult to operationalize as you still needed to handle post-configurations through other mechanisms. Trying to keep both solutions did not make sense for me and I ended up opting for the traditional scripted installation method via Kickstart which I had hooks into automate the full ESXi configuration.

In vSphere 6.5, there was a huge effort to significantly improve both Auto Deploy and Host Profile to what customers had expected of this feature, especially around bringing parity between the configurations that could be done using the vSphere Clients and/or vSphere APIs into Host Profiles. In addition, there was also several UI enhancements that now makes it possible to use both Auto Deploy and Image Builder directly from the vSphere Web Client which was never possible before. For more details, be sure to check out the What's New vSphere 6.5 white paper here.

One new feature that I think is worth calling out is the new Script Bundle capability in Auto Deploy. Previously, if a particular configuration was not available via Host Profiles, there was nothing you could really do and you had to write your own custom post-deployment script to apply to the ESXi host. As I mentioned earlier, in vSphere 6.5, we have closed the gap on the ESXi configurations that were not possible using Host Profile and will ensure that will be in sync going forward. Having said that, there are still certain configurations that are not possible today such as creating a custom ESXi firewall rule for example. For these cases, you either had to either hack it up using a method like this or to create a custom ESXi VIB which would then force customers to lower their ESXi's software acceptance level which was not ideal nor acceptable, especially for customers that are security conscious.

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ESXi 6.5 Virtual Appliance is now available

11.18.2016 by William Lam // 32 Comments

The much anticipated release of vSphere 6.5 has officially GA'ed and you can find all the release notes and downloads over here. Just like prior releases, I have created a new Nested ESXi Virtual Appliance to aide in quickly setting up a vSphere 6.5 environment for both educational as well as lab purposes. If you have not used this Virtual Appliance before, I strongly recommend you thoroughly review this blog post here for the background before proceeding further.

Disclaimer: Nested ESXi and Nested Virtualization is not officially supported by VMware, please use this at your own risk (the usual).

The new ESXi 6.5 Virtual Appliance includes the following configuration:

ESXi 6.5 OS [New]
GuestType: ESXi 6.5[New]
vHW 11 [New]
2 vCPU
6GB vMEM
2 x VMXNET vNIC
1 x PVSCSI Adapter [New]
1 x 2GB HDD (ESXi Installation)
1 x 4GB SSD (for use w/VSAN, empty by default)
1 x 8GB SSD (for use w/VSAN, empty by default)
VHV added (more info here)
dvFilter Mac Learn VMX params added (more info here)
disk.enableUUID VMX param added
VSAN traffic tagged on vmk0
Disabled VSAN device monitoring for home labs (more info here)
VMFS6 will be used if user selects to create VMFS volume [New]
Enabled sparse swap (more info here) [New]

To be able to import and use this new ESXi VA, you will need to be running at least vSphere 6.0 Update 2 in your environment as I take advantage of some of the new Nested ESXi enhancements in vSphere 6.5. If you need to run ESXi 6.5 on earlier versions of vSphere, then you can take my existing 5.5 or 6.0 VAs and manually upgrade to 6.5.

Now that you made it this far, here is download: Nested_ESXi6.5d_Appliance_Template_v1.ova

Lastly, I have also spent some time building some new automation scripts which takes advantage of my Nested ESXi VAs and deploys a fully functional vSphere lab environment without even breaking a sweat. Below is a little sneak peak at what you can expect 😀 Watch the blog for more details!