As a heads up, I just wanted to share that VMware has just published a new knowledge base article to communicate that ESXi 7.x will be the last major release to officially support Apple macOS Virtualization, which was originally introduced back in 2011 with the release of vSphere 5.0.
Last year, VMware had also published a blog outlining that they will no longer pursue hardware certification for the Apple 2019 Mac Pro 7,1 for ESXi and as unfortunate as this is, hopefully this updated news will not come as a surprise to any of our customers or partners due to the various challenges in supporting the Apple hardware platform with ESXi.
On a more personal note, this is also a bitter sweet end, I have been writing about Apple macOS Virtualization on ESXi since its inception almost exactly 11 years ago. I came to learn about the new virtualization capability during an on-site beta for vSphere 5.0 (codenamed MN) at VMware HQ back when I was a customer. Not only did our organization have a need for this capability, but this was also the time that Apple had announced EOL'ed of Apple XServe, which was the initial hardware platform that was officially supported. I still recall emailing our leadership after the on-site to purchase as many XServe as we could before you could no longer buy the systems so that we can enable our development teams who were building both iOS and macOS applications.
It certainly has been a wild ride over the years in advocating for our users and their plethora of use cases to getting the Apple Mac Mini to run ESXi like any other x86 platform and even getting the Apple Mac Mini added to the VMware HCL. I still remember all the hoops and hacks that one needed to jump through just to boot ESXi and over the years, various VMware Engineers have incrementally helped get us to where we are at today, so a big thanks for all of their support over the years.
