smc

Retrieving Apple hardware details (Model, Serial, Board & EFI Boot ROM & SMC Version) from ESXi

10.31.2018 by William Lam // 3 Comments

For customers who run ESXi on Apple Hardware, retrieving the Apple hardware specific information such as the Board ID, EFI Boot Room and SMC Version for troubleshooting or auditing purposes can be challenging. Historically, this information is only available when running the hardware with an Apple MacOS operating system and customers would have to either boot the system into the MacOS Recovery Mode to run the system profiler tool from the command-line or install a full blown MacOS operating system to retrieve the necessary information as outlined in this Apple KB.

For some customers, this may not even be an option as Apple hardware does not provide any remote management capabilities and customers must physically be in front of the system to perform this process and imagine needing to do this across a fleet of Apple servers.

While working on a recent case with a customer, I was curious if the Apple specific information could be retrieved from within ESXi and remove the need to boot into MacOS? I reached out to one of the Engineers, Darius Davis, who I work with on a frequent basis when it comes to MacOS-related topics to see if this was possible.

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How to build custom ESXi ISO for Apple Mac Mini?

09.11.2014 by William Lam // 43 Comments

For those of you who own an Apple Mac Mini 6,2 may recall some of the, lets call them "challenges" on getting ESXi to run on the Mini. These challenges range from known SMC issues from Apple to missing or updated Broadcom tg3 network drivers. Though there workarounds for these issue, the process was quite complex. I took it upon myself to help simplify it by building custom ESXi ISO's for most of the major ESXi releases so that users could simply install ESXi as they normally would and by-pass all the complexity.

This has worked for the majority of folks but I have received several requests for those that may not be comfortable with just downloading a random ISO on the internet, which I can fully understand. The other reason is that some folks would like to build their own custom ISO and include other drivers/packages and others are just interested in the process. This has been on my to-do list for awhile but it was finding the time to document the process but also I normally like to take it a step further and see how I can make it even more simple 🙂

Disclaimer: Running ESXi on an Apple Mac Mini is not officially supported by VMware, please use at your own risk

With the recent release of vSphere 5.5 Update 2, I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to show how you can build your own custom ESXi ISO to run on the Apple Mac Mini 6,2.

Note: Earlier versions of Mac Mini should work fine for the most part without additional modifications.

Before I get started, I would also like to mention that several of the "challenges" such as having an updated Broadcom tg3 drivers have been fixed in the latest ESXi 5.5 Update 2 release, so out of the box you will be able to see the on-board network device working as expected and Ethernet Thunderbolt will also be functional if you are using that device with no additional drivers being required. I have been able to successfully install the default out of the box ESXi 5.5 Update 2 ISO from VMware on my Apple Mac Mini 5,3 without any additional changes.

Here is the process for building your own custom ESXi ISO for your Mac Mini:

Step 1 - Download the ESXi ISO you wish to work with

Step 2 - You will need access to a Linux system (recommend CentOS) that has mkisofs utlity, which is used to author an ISO

Step 3 - Download my custom.tgz which will automatically handle the SMC issue for Apple Mac Mini 6,2

Step 4 - Download my ghettotize-esxi-iso.sh which is a shell script that will automatically take an ESXi ISO and author a new ISO containing the fixes. The script is pretty straight forward and you can take a look at the script for all the details.

Here is an example of running the script against the latest ESXi 5.5 Update 2 ISO:

As you can see at the end of the script, you should get a new authored ISO with a -NEW in the filename:

Once you have the new ISO, you can then take that and load that onto a USB device. I like using unetbootin which is a handy utility that is supported on all platforms and creates a bootable USB device with the ISO provided. As you can see the process is pretty straight forward and though it took a bit of "experimentation" on my end to make it completely seamless, you can see there is too much to the process in general.

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

08.08.2014 by William Lam // 1 Comment

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:

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

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:

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.