The first Beta of Apple MacOS 11 (Big Sur) was just released a couple of days ago and I know folks are excited to start kicking the tires. Some folks have noticed when to installing Big Sur running on VMware Fusion, the following error is observed:

BIErrorDomain error 3

From the suggested workarounds, it looks like the MacOS installer was somehow unable to detect that the underlying hardware was Apple which causes this generic error to be thrown. Interestingly, this was the same error I came across when attempting to install Big Sur on ESXi 7.0. Instead of having to lookup your physical Apple hardware IDs and specify several VM Advanced Settings, you can simply add the following setting which will accomplish the same behavior:

smbios.reflectHost = "TRUE"

After the setting has been applied, the error should go away and you should be able to upgrade from an existing MacOS deployment to Big Sur. This issue has already been reported internally at VMware and I have also shared with the teams the quick workaround.

Here is Big Sur on ESXi 7.0 running on an Apple Mac Mini 2018 (requires ESXi 7.0b patch VMware-ESXi-7.0b-16324942)

Here is Big Sur on ESXi 6.7 Update 3 running on an Apple Mac Mini 2018 (requires ESXi 6.7 Patch 02 ESXi670-202004002)