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ESXi 6.5 support for Apple Mac Pro 6,1

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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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How to automate the deployment of an un-configured VCSA 6.5 (Stage 1 only)?

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In vSphere 6.5, the VCSA deployment has changed from a "Single" monolithic stage where a user inputs all of the required parameters up front and then the installer goes and deploys/configures the VCSA. In the new VCSA UI Installer, we still continue to provide a "Single" monolithic user experience but behind the scenes, the deployment is now actually composed of two distinct stages, creatively called Stage 1 and Stage 2.

  • Stage 1 - Initial OVA deployment which includes basic networking + OS password
  • Stage 2 - Applying the VCSA specific configurations (e.g. External Platform Services or Embedded VCSA)

One reason why this is so useful is that in previous releases of the VCSA, if you had fat fingered say the DNS entry or wanted to change the IP Address/Hostname before applying the actual application configurations, your only option was to re-deploy the VCSA, not a very good user experience. With this new deployment model, customers now have the ability to either go through both Stage 1 and Stage2 or they can stop just after Stage 1 which would allow them to make necessary edits before continuing to Stage 2. If you decide to stop after Stage 1, then to complete the deployment, you will need to open a browser and finish the configuration using the VCSA's Virtual Appliance Management Interface (VAMI) at https://[VCSA-HOSTNAME-OR-IP]:5480

vcsa-6-5-installer-3
Once on the VAMI UI, you will want to select the "Set up vCenter Server Appliance" which will then launch the configuration wizard. From here, you will have the option of changing some of the settings that you had provided in Stage 1 such as the IP Address or things like NTP or enabling SSH access as shown in the screenshot below. Once you have confirmed these settings, it will be saved and then you will move onto Stage 2 to complete the configuration of your VCSA deployment.

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vCenter Server High Availability (VCHA) PowerCLI 6.5 community module

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As some of you may know, I have been spending some time with the new vCenter Server High Availability (VCHA) feature that was introduced in vSphere 6.5. In fact, I had even published an article a few weeks back on how to enable the new vCenter Server High Availability (VCHA) feature with only a single ESXi host which allowed me to explore some of the new VCHA APIs without needing a whole lot of resources to start with, obviously, you would not do this in production 🙂

For those of you who are not familiar with the new VCHA feature which is only available with the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA), Feidhlim O'Leary has an excellent write up that goes over the details and even provides demo videos covering both the "Basic" and "Advanced" workflows of VCHA. I highly recommend you give his blog post a read before moving forward as this article will assume you understand how VCHA works.

In playing with the new VCHA APIs, I decided to create a few VCHA functions which I thought would be useful to have as a PowerCLI module for others to use and also try out. With that, I have published my VCHA.psm1 module on the PowerCLI Community Repo on Github which includes the following functions:

Name Description
Get-VCHAConfig Retrieves the VCHA Configuration
Get-VCHAClusterHealth Retrieve the VCHA Cluster Health
Set-VCHAClusterMode Sets the VCHA Cluster Mode (Enable/Disable/Maintenance)
New-VCHABasieConfig Creates a new "Basic" VCHA Cluster
Remove-VCHACluster Destroys a VCHA Cluster

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