Many of you may have wanted to run a Mac OS X virtual machine in your vSphere setup but get hit with the error that darwin11–64Guest is not supported, as outlined in VMware KB 2006093. As the KB explains that this is because you must be running Apple certified hardware to run a Mac OS X virtual machine. I’m sure that this has to do with the licensing of the OS X product. But you may want to run a vm or two to test software in your environment.
Oct 31, 2014 Step 1 - A prerequisite that must be met prior to installing ESXi is to have the Apple boot ROM update on the Mac Pro 6,1 running on MP61.0116.B05 or higher. This great piece of tidbit came from Josh who discovered issues while trying to install ESXi and found out this was a requirement after opening a case with Apple Engineering. Accessing ESXi Shell and running esxcfg-vmknic -l will list the configured vmknics and the configurations (including the MAC) of each: There are 2 ways to correct this in the cloned ESXi hosts. One way is to delete and recreate the vmk interface. The other is to set the vmknics to use the hardware MAC address of their physical uplink NIC. VMware ESX' MAC addresses flaps with Cisco 4506 Hi. We have a Cisco 4506 with a Supervisor V, running cat4500-ENTSERVICES-M, version 12.2(46)SG. Several IBM x3850s running VMware ESX 4.0.0 332073 are connected to the 4506 with 4 traffic ports, 2 management ports and 1 RSA port each. Oct 07, 2008 I made an.ISO of a Mojave install by installing and then cloned the install to a HFS+ file system, then making a.iso of that.On ESXi I made a 64 bit OSX custom machine. Booted from the the installer.iso and used the installer iso disk utility to restore the pre-installed Mojave.iso to the VMWare disk and it worked!
The MAC address of additional vmkernel interfaces won't use the host MAC identifier. (Click image to view larger version.) With virtualization comes many levels of abstraction, and the vmkernel interface is an important aspect of the vSphere implementation. Jan 15, 2019 ESXi 6.7 installed and working My hardware: Fujitsu D3417-B2 (Intel C236), Xeon E3-1245 v6, 32GB RAM, 1250 GB SSDs and 8 TB HDDs This guide assumes that all steps are executed on a mac; most can be done on most other operating systems as well, except for Step 3. Aim Installing fully functional version of macOS Mojave on ESXi.
The Workaround
Jul 20, 2016 How To – ESXi Tutorials, IT and virtualization tutorials, VMware ESXi 4.x, ESXi 5.x and VMware vSphere. VMware Workstation and other IT tutorials. Free Stuff – Free virtualization utilities, ESXi Free, Monitoring and free backup utilities for ESXi and Hyper-V. Free IT tools.
Luckily the heavy lifting to get around this has been done by InsanelyMac user Donk. He has created an unlocker tool for non-Apple hardware to be able to boot Mac OS X virtual machines. His tool works for other versions of VMware like Workstation but I’m going to focus on using it for ESXi.
There are two different versions of his unlocker utility, one for ESXi 5.0/5.1/5.5 and another for ESXi 6.0. Make sure that you use the appropriate utility for the version of your ESXi host.
How It’s Done
ESXi 6.0
Download Mac OS X Unlocker for VMware V2 (currently V2.0.6) from the InsanelyMac download page.
- Extract unlocker206.zip to a folder on your computer.
- Upload the contents to a datastore on your ESXi host.
- Put your host in maintenance mode.
- Enable the ESXi shell by following these directions if you haven’t already done so.
- Open the ESXi shell.
- Navigate to the directory on the datastore where the unlocker was uploaded to:
Where Datastore is the datastore name where the patch file was uploaded to, and DirectoryName is the directory you created on the datastore.
- Make the install script executable.
- Run the install script.
- Reboot the ESXi host:
- Exit maintenance mode, and enjoy.
- Use the darwin.iso file in the tools folder to mount and install VMware Tools.
ESXi 5.0/5.1/5.5
Download Mac OS X Unlocker for VMware (currently V1.3.0) from the InsanelyMac download page.
- Extract unlocker-all-v130.zip to a folder on your computer.
- Upload the contents to a datastore on your ESXi host.
- Put your host in maintenance mode.
- Enable the ESXi shell by following these directions if you haven’t already done so.
- Open the ESXi shell.
- Navigate to the directory on the datastore where the unlocker was uploaded to:
Where Datastore is the datastore name where the patch file was uploaded to, and DirectoryName is the directory you created on the datastore.
- Make the install script executable.
- Run the install script.
- Reboot the host.
- Exit Maintenance Mode, and enjoy.
- Use the darwin.iso file in the tools folder to mount and install VMware Tools.
Esxi Mac Hacked
Installing Mac OS X
You have to follow certain instructions to install Mac OS X from the installation media. It’s not complicated but it’s not straight forward either. You can view these instructions on the VMware website:
Summary
Esxi Mac Hack Download
This quick little fix has been working for me on two virtual machines running Mac OS X 10.10. In the two weeks I’ve been running them I’ve yet to have any issues, performance or otherwise, with using this fix or using the virtual machines. I hope this article helps solve the issue of running Mac OS X on non-certified non-Apple hardware.