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Instant Clone Apple MacOS

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Whether you are a brand new startup working on the next hot mobile app or an established Enterprise or Consumer brand company, development and testing of Apple iOS and/or MacOS is simply a reality in todays world. The vast majority of these customers accomplish this by running Apple MacOS on vSphere, either within their own on-premises datacenter or leveraging MacStadium, the largest MacOS Cloud hosting provider, who also runs their Mac infrastructure using VMware vSphere.

The ability to quickly build/test and deploy your application (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) can mean the difference of having an edge over you competitor or being able to keep up with the demands of your business. Many customers have benefited from using vSphere platform and with technologies like Linked Clones, which allows you to quickly spin up a new VM without having to perform a complete full clone, it means you can build and test your application even faster.

In vSphere 6.7, we introduced a major enhancement to Instant Clone, which you can read more about here and here. One of the questions I have been seeing lately is whether Instant Clone can be applied to MacOS guests? The answer is absolutely! In fact, Matt Moriarity, who works for TravisCI, recently shared some tidbits on how to get a MacOS Mojave guests to see the updated MAC Address to ensure that there are no network conflicts when performing an Instant Clone.

The majority of the "hard" work to use Instant Clone is really from within the GuestOS and the customization script that needs to be developed. In fact, Instant Clone is pretty OS agnostics and you can even Instant Clone Microsoft Windows 98 and 2000, if you really wanted to 😀

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Dynamic vSphere Health Checks in vSphere 6.7+

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One really neat feature of the vSphere HTML5 Client that was shipped in vSphere 6.7 is the ability to deliver new data applications that can run in the vSphere UI without requiring customers to update or upgrade their underlying vCenter Server. An example of this is the vSphere Health Check plugin that was included in vSphere 6.7, which I am guessing most folks probably did not even notice, including myself. The vSphere Health plugin is located at the vCenter Server level and under Monitor->Health as shown in the screenshot below.


Unlike a traditional vSphere Plugin, where the code and business logic is local to the vCenter Server and must be updated each time for new functionality, these data applications are actually delivered automatically and more importantly, out-of-band to a vCenter Server patch or upgrade. This means as new functionality is added, customers will automatically get the latest updates without having to do anything. So how does this actually work?

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How to simulate Persistent Memory (PMem) in vSphere 6.7 for educational purposes? 

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A really cool new capability that was introduced in vSphere 6.7 is the support for the extremely fast memory technology known as non-volatile memory (NVM), also known as persistent memory (PMem). Customers can now benefit from the high data transfer rate of volatile memory with the persistence and resiliency of traditional storage. As of this blog post, both Dell and HP have Persistent Memory support and you can see the list of supported devices and systems here and here.


PMem can be consumed in one of two methods:

  • Virtual PMem (vPMem) - In this mode, the GuestOS is actually PMem-aware and can consume the physical PMem device on the ESXi host as standard, byte-addressable memory. In addition to using an OS that supports PMem, you will also need to ensure that the VM is running the latest Virtual Hardware 14
  • Virtual PMem Disks (vPMemDisk) - In this mode, the GuestOS is NOT PMem-aware and does not have access to the physical PMem device. Instead, a new virtual PMem hard disk can be created and attached to a VM. To ensure the PMem hard disk is placed on the PMem Datastore as part of this workflow, a new PMem VM Storage Policy will be applied automatically. There are no additional GuestOS or VM Virtual Hardware requirement for this scenario, this is great for legacy OS that are not PMem-aware

Customers who may want to familiarize themselves with these new PMem workflows, especially for Automation or educational purposes, could definitely benefit from the ability to simulate PMem in their vSphere environment prior to obtaining a physical PMem device. Fortunately, this is something you can actually do if you have some additional spare memory from your physical ESXi host.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware. Unlike a real physical PMem device where your data will be persisted upon a reboot, the simulated method will NOT persist your data. Please use this at your own risk and do not place important or critical VMs using this method.

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