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MacOS 11 (Big Sur) Beta 1 on ESXi

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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)

Virtually Speaking Podcast: MacOS Virtualization and MacStadium

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Last week I had the pleasure to be on the Virtually Speaking Podcast (#1 Virtualization Podcast) to talk a little about the history and the use cases driving MacOS Virtualization in the Enterprise. In fact, this affects most if not every single organization that develops either an Apple MacOS and/or iOS application which includes VMware.

We also had a very special guest, Preston Lasebikan, a Systems Architect for MacStadium who gave us some insights into how they are supporting major Enterprise customers such as Dropbox, Capital One, Shopify, Box and many others using their Apple Mac Infrastructure which runs on VMware vSphere. If you never heard of MacStadium before, they are the largest service provider of Apple Mac Infrastructure as a Service in the world and there is a high probability your organization is already using them with you even knowing.

Click on the image below to listen 👇

How to exclude VCSA UI/CLI Installer from MacOS Catalina Security Gatekeeper?

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A couple of weeks ago I had upgraded my personal home computer to the latest MacOS Catalina (10.15) and one of the first issues I ran into was being able to access my vCenter Server. It turned out this was due to changes to MacOS security (which is a good thing) but certainly caught me and others off guard. In fact, I spent quite some time searching online and eventually found this workaround here.

After sharing this tidbit online (which several others also ran into) I came to learn that both Duncan Epping blogged about this issue back in Nov 2019 here and Christian Mohn blogged about this in Dec 2019 here. Sadly I did not come across either of their blogs using "NET::ERR_CERT_REVOKED macos catalina" in Google. I had assumed this was a Chrome issue and simply landed on the first few links and looking back, I now see Duncan's blog was #6 in the search results (doh!)

Today, I ran into another issue when attempting to use the VCSA CLI Installer, the following error was thrown:

“vcsa-deploy.bin” cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified


This is again due to a security change in MacOS Catalina which now prevents terminal-based applications which are not notarized from running. For a single application/binary, you can go into System Preferences->Security & Privacy and allow anyway. For more complex applications like the VCSA CLI Installer which has a number of libraries and scripts, this will take awhile and end up frustrating end users. The updated security enhancement is actually a good thing and I did not want to disable the Gatekeeper service but I was interested in disabling it for the VCSA CLI Installer. While searching online, I came across this Hashicorp Terraform thread where folks were having the exact same issue and I found out there was a way to disable the MacOS Security Gatekeeper for a specific application.

To do so, we just need to recursively remove the metadata attribute "com.apple.quarantine" for the extracted VCSA ISO by running the following command:

sudo xattr -r -d com.apple.quarantine VMware-VCSA-all-6.7.0-Update-15132721

After the quarantine attribute has been removed, you can now run the VCSA CLI Installer (including UI Installer) without being prompted with an error. Hopefully VMware will consider notarizing future releases of the VCSA Installer and I will be sharing this feedback internally if it has not already.