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Can a VM in the VMC Compute Network access the SDDC Management Network?

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Similiar to an on-premises vSphere deployment, VMware Cloud on AWS follows good security practices by isolating and preventing access to the SDDC Management Network including Virtual Machines running in the Compute Network. With that said, the SDDC can be configured to enable access to the SDDC Management Network for either all or subset of workloads running in the Compute Network.

I have seen this request come up a few times, usually around proof of concepts, lack of on-premises infrastructure or wanting to run completely isolated within VMC for Dev/Test purposes. Below are the step by step instruction on setting this up for both an NSX-V and NSX-T based SDDC. Once enabled, customers can access the vCenter vSphere UI from within the specified Virtual Machine(s) including using tools like OVFTool or PowerCLI for importing new or existing workloads.

Note: Please refer to this blog post here to determine if you are running an NSX-V or NSX-T based SDDC.

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Heads Up - Apple Mac Pro 6,1 fails to boot after upgrading to ESXi 6.7 Update 1

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We had a number of customers report that after upgrading their Apple Mac Pro 6,1 to the latest ESXi 6.7 Update 1 release, the system failed to boot and the following error was seen on the console:

Shutting down firmware services...
Mutiboot buffer is too small.
Unrecoverable error

A few customers made the observation that this was in result of a newer version of the Apple Firmware that was included in the Mac Pro 6,1 systems which seemed to have cause this problem. In addition, this also impacts brand new installations of ESXi 6.7 Update 1 on new Mac Pro 6,1 that includes a newer version of the Firmware. At this time, is it NOT recommended to upgrade to ESXi 6.7 Update 1 if you are running the Mac Pro 6,1. A request has already been made to the VMware HCL team to remove Mac Pro 6,1 for ESXi 6.7 Update 1 and hopefully should be reflected by later this evening.

UPDATE 04/11/19 - This issue has been resolved in vSphere 6.7 Update 2

Note: This issue can also affect the Apple Mac Mini, which is not an officially supported platform for ESXi.

In the mean time, VMware has published KB 59660 which provides a workaround that may help customers who have upgraded their Mac Pro 6,1 to ESXi 6.7 Update 1 to rollback to the previously installed version of ESXi. Please refer to the KB for more details and you can subscribe to the article for future updates regarding this issue.

ESXi on the new 2018 Apple Mac Mini

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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.

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