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How to run Nested Mac OS X guest on ESXi VM on top VMware Fusion?

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You might be asking, why would anyone want to do this? Well, luckily this is not a "because you can" type of answer but was it was an interesting solution that one of our VMware Engineers (Darius) had shared with me after helping out on this VMTN Community forum thread.

The user was running VMware Fusion on his physical Mac OS X system and wanted to be able to test OS X Mavericks under ESXi. Not having a physical ESXi host to test with, the next best thing was to run a ESXi VM under VMware Fusion and then run the Mavericks guest on top of that.

Here is a quick diagram of the user setup:

nested-mac-osx-vm-on-esxi-on-fusion0
The issue with just simply doing this is that for a Mac OS X guest to properly run on ESXi, the underlying hardware must be Apple Hardware. The reason for this is not a technical challenges, but rather a legal one per Apple's EULA. The way in which ESXi detects that the underlying hardware is Apple is by checking whether Apple's SMC (System Management Controller) is available.

In the scenario above, the Nested ESXi VM is not automatically passing through the SMC from the physical Mac OS X system and hence the Mac OS X VM at the very top of the stack will not properly function. The solution that Darius found was to add the following two Advanced VM Settings (VMX) entries to the ESXi VM:

smc.present = "TRUE"
smbios.reflectHost = "TRUE"

This will allow the passing of the underlying SMC up into the Nested ESXi VM which will then allow Mac OS X guest VMs to properly function. We can also confirm this by check the Nested ESXi MOB by pointing a browser to the following URL: https://[ESXI-IP]/mob/?moid=ha-host&doPath=hardware

nested-mac-osx-vm-on-esxi-on-fusion3
If you did not add the two entries above, then the smcPresent property would show up as false. In our case, we did add the following two entries and we now run our Mac OS X Guest. Here are a couple of screenshots of performing this on my iMac at home running the same exact configuration:

nested-mac-osx-vm-on-esxi-on-fusion1nested-mac-osx-vm-on-esxi-on-fusion2
Thanks Darius for sharing this with me and the community! I am sure this will come in handy for anyone wanting to test Mac OS X guests under ESXi but do not have a physical ESXi host and can easily substitute using VMware Fusion.

How to quickly deploy CoreOS on ESXi?

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deploy-coreos-on-esxiThere has been a tremendous amount of buzz lately regarding Docker, a platform that allows developers to easily build, deploy and manage Linux Containers. Docker can run on variety of Linux Distributions, one that has been quite popular lately is a new Linux Distribution called CoreOS.

CoreOS is actually a fork of Google's ChromeOS and was designed to run next generation workloads similar to those at Google and Facebook. A major benefit of CoreOS is the minimal footprint the base operating system consumes which allows for maximum resource utilization for the Container workloads.

Having heard so much about Docker and CoreOS, I figure this would be a great opportunity to explore and learn about a new technology which I always enjoy when I get the time. I know Duncan Epping has written an article on how to run CoreOS on VMware Fusion, but since I primarily work with vSphere, I wanted to run CoreOS on ESXi. The first place I went to was the CoreOS documentation and there is a section for VMware. After going through the instructions, I found the process to be quite manual and potentially requiring additional tools as a simple OVF/OVA for CoreOS did not exist.

I figured I could wrap the process in a very simple shell script that only required a couple of input parameters from the user based on their environment and the script would auto-magically handle the deployment. I created a shell script that would run on the ESXi Shell called deploy_coreos_on_esxi.sh

Note: The script assumes you can connect directly to the CoreOS website to download the zip directly onto the ESXi host.

There are three variables that you will need to edit prior to running the script:

  • DATASTORE_PATH - The full path to the Datastore to deploy CoreOS onto (e.g. /vmfs/volumes/datastore)
  • VM_NETWORK - The name of the vSphere Network to connect the CoreOS VM to
  • VM_NAME - The name of the CoreOS VM

Once you have finished editing the script, you just need to scp to your ESXi host and run the script using the following command:

./deploy_coreos_on_esxi.sh

Here is screenshot of running the script:

deploy-coreos-on-esxi-0
Once the script has completed, you should see a new CoreOS VM on your ESXi host and if you have DHCP, you should also see an associated IP Address in the VM Console:

deploy-coreos-on-esxi-1
Once the CoreOS VM is booted up, you use the SSH key that was included in the zip file, by default it is also extracted into the CoreOS VM directory. You can SSH into the VM by running the following command:

ssh -i insecure_ssh_key core@IP-ADDRESS-OF-COREOS-VM

Once logged in, we can run "docker images" to see a list of Containers. As you can see that there is only one and we can connect to that Container by running the "toolbox" command which will pull down the latest and then connect to that Container as seen in the screenshot below.

deploy-coreos-on-esxi-3
I was hoping that I could also get VMware Tools installed within the CoreOS VM, but I was not able to get SSH working within the Toolbox as stated in the Install Debugging Tools documentation. I may need to tinker around a bit more with CoreOS.

If you are interested in other methods of deploying CoreOS, be sure to check out CoreOS's documentation.

Additional Resources:

Quick Update - ESXi support for Apple Mac Pro 6,1

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I know many of you have been asking about ESXi support for the latest Mac Pro 6,1 that was released from Apple late last year and I just wanted to give a quick update. VMware Engineering has been hard at work on getting this new platform certified and supported with ESXi, however, there were some unforeseen challenges that is currently preventing the current version of ESXi to run on the new Mac Pro.

VMware is working closely with Apple's hardware team to resolve these issues and we expect to have a Mac Pro 6,1 supported with ESXi 5.5 in the future. In the meantime, if you wish to evaluate ESXi on the new Mac Pro (though not officially supported), you can sign up for the new vSphere Beta and run a Beta version of ESXi on the new Mac Pro.

Here is a screenshot of Mac Pro 6,1 running the Beta version of ESXi:

esxi-mac-pro-6.1-0
There are a couple of workarounds that is required for right now, which will all be resolved by GA. For more details, please refer to this VMTN thread.