WilliamLam.com

ESXi on the new 2018 Apple Mac Mini

by // 41 Comments

Thanks to the Green Mini Host (Apple Mac Mini hosting and collocation provider) who were the first to publicly confirm that latest release of ESXi (6.7 Update 1) works on the recently announced 2018 Apple Mac Mini.

For vSphere/vSAN Home Lab enthusiasts, the price of the new Mac Mini, especially when it is fully loaded is probably a tough sale. However, for customers developing on MacOS including iOS development, CI/CD, build farms, gaming, etc. which benefit from running on vSphere. For these customers, support for ESXi on the new Mac Mini is extremely interesting, especially with the updated hardware giving these systems a significant boost in performance even when comparing to the current Mac Pro 6,1 and iMac Pro models. In fact, I had number of folks ping me after Apple introduced it during their keynote asking if ESXi would work on the Mini's.

UPDATE (06/25/20) - The Apple 2018 Mac Mini 8,1 is now officially on the VMware HCL and is fully supported with ESXi 7.0b, which contains the fixes mentioned above. See note below on 06/23 for more information.

UPDATE (06/23/20) - ESXi 7.0b has just been released and contains fixes for both the MacOS guest boot issue support for Thunderbolt 3 devices which now enables support for the vSphere 7 release. One additional enhancement, customers no longer need to configure the ESXi Advanced Setting to enable Thunderbolt 3 support, this is now automatically configured based on detecting an Apple hardware system such as an Apple Mac Mini 2018 or Apple Mac Pro 2019. This is a patch release and you will need to go to the VMware Patch Portal site to download and apply the update.

UPDATE (04/28/20) - ESXi 6.7 Patch 02 resolves a number of the issues mentioned below, please take a look at this blog post here for more details.

Disclaimer: 2018 Apple Mac Mini are NOT officially supported by VMware. The only officially supported Apple hardware platform is the Mac Pro 6,1 or Mac Pro 5,1 and Mac Mini 6,2 or Mac Mini 7,1. For more details, please refer to VMware's Hardware Compatibility List.

[Read more...]

Direct playback & download URLs for all VMworld 2018 Europe Sessions

by // Leave a Comment

It has been less than 24 hours since VMworld Europe 2018 has concluded and the awesome VMworld team has already published most of the VMworld 2018 Europe session recordings! Similar to past years, I have put together a nice summary page that contains all the session recordings links separated out by the different  categories which you can find by visiting http://vmwa.re/vmworld2018.

As of writing this, there are a total of 389 sessions with369 published with recordings. I have also posted some initial viewing statistics on the top 20 VMworld Europe sessions, huge congrats to the Chris and Daniel's ESXi on ARM session, I think it is going to be hard to beat this session (which I still need to watch myself :)). I will check back in a week or so in case more videos and/or PPT decks are posted. Please enjoy, especially for those that were not able to attend VMworld this year.

Note: For those wanting to directly download the actual video files from github repo (browser or through automation), you will get an access denied. It turns out the client performing the download must include a referer within the request (which is automatically done for you when you click open the link in my github but not the case using wget/cURL or other tools. Below are a few examples on how to include the referer for automated downloads which has changed from VMworld US.

Here is wget example:

wget --referer https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/26950 https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/vmworld-europe-2018/CTO3509BE.mp4

Here is cURL example:

curl --referer https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/26950 https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/vmworld-europe-2018/CTO3509BE.mp4 -O CTO3509BE.mp4

Here is PowerCLI example:

$headers = @{"referer" = "https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/26950"}
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/vmworld-europe-2018/CTO3509BE.mp4 -Headers $headers -Outfile CTO3509BE.mp4

In addition, I have also published eu.txt file which contains the name of the session + download URL which can then be used by this quick PowerShell script called downloadSessions.ps1 to automatically download. You can edit the us.txt file to only include sessions you want downloaded (make sure its copied from the original file) since it contains "#" symbol as a delimiter for the title and the download URL.

ESXi on a Raspberry Pi

by // 46 Comments

During the closing of the VMworld Europe Keynote on Tuesday, Ray O'Farrell (CTO of VMware) had one more "tiny" surprise for our CEO, Pat Gelsinger 😉 He handed him a tiny little device called the Raspberry Pi (rPI) which was running a prototype version of ESXi! This was completely unexpected even for VMware Employees, especially as we had just announced our ESXi on ARM initiative at VMworld US. You can watch the keynote replay here starting at 1:37:15.

As you can imagine, this created a TON of excitement and buzz at the VMworld but it also sparked some interesting conversations on why VMware would even do this? Was this just a marketing gimmick or was there something more significant in showing that ESXi could run on a rPI?

[Read more...]