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vSphere 8 on Apple Mac Hardware

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While vSphere 7.x is the last vSphere release to officially support Apple MacOS Virtualization running on ESXi, my own curiosity got the best of me and I was just curious if ESXi 8.0 could still run on recent Apple Mac Hardware ...

Disclaimer: VMware does NOT officially support running ESXi 8.0 on Apple Hardware nor Apple MacOS Virtualization using vSphere 8, this is purely for educational and informational purposes. Please use at your own risk.

Attempting to boot the ESXi 8.0 installer on an Apple Mac Mini 8,1 (2018) will halt the installer and result in the following exception.


UPDATE (07/26/23) - ESXi 8.0 Update 1a installs fine on an Apple Mac Mini 5,3 (2011), but you will need to ensure you have Apple Thunderbolt 2 network adapter as ESXi no longer supports the onboard adapter. You also will need to append an additional ESXi boot option (SHIFT+O) allowLegacyCPU=true to by pass the CPU check.

UPDATE (10/11/22) - Thanks to user psm (MacAdmins Slack Group) for sharing ESXi 8.0 works on Apple Mac Mini 7,1 (2014)✅ and reader Jon (left comment) that ESXi 8.0 works on Apple Mac Pro 7,1 (2019)✅

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vSphere Session Timeout Overview

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I periodically get questions about vSphere "session timeouts" and because there are several different session timeouts in vSphere, there is usually a back and fourth to understand which session timeout a user is specifically asking about? 🙂

Once the specific vSphere session timeout has been identified, the next series of questions are typically:

  • What is the default or current value?
  • Is it configurable?
  • If so, where and how can I change it?

To help simplify questions around this topic, I have put together this quick overview that also includes details for each specific session timeout and where to find and update the values.

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Is the vCenter Server Unique ID still important today?

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When I was a customer back in the day, one of my operational checklist items for deploying a vCenter Server was to configure the vCenter Server ID and ensure that it was unique from other vCenter Servers within my environment.


The vCenter Server ID is a value between 0-63 that is randomly generated by default, but it can updated by a user after the vCenter Server has been deployed.

Why should you care about the vCenter Server ID? vCenter Server uses this ID to generate Virtual Machine MAC Addresses and if two vCenter Servers have the same ID, it can potentially generate duplicate VM MAC Addresses as explained in this VMware KB 1024025.

With this background in mind, is having a unique vCenter Server ID still relavent and applicable today in 2022?

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