The expandability of the Apple 2019 Mac Pro (7,1) has been the primary reason VMware customers have been so excited for this new platform for virtualizing macOS on ESXi. The most common request that I hear from customers is for GPU passthrough.
Although VMware does not officially support GPU passthrough, even for the existing Apple hardware systems on the VMware HCL, this has been a topic I have been keeping an eye out on, especially from what the VMware community is doing in this space.
My intention for this blog post is to provide a resource for the community on capturing the success and failures when attempting GPU passthrough on a 2019 Mac Pro. For those interested and have capable hardware, you may want to start with the VMware HCL for GPU passthrough devices listed under Virtual Dedicated Graphics Acceleration (vDGA). This may be your best chance to successfully passthrough a GPU that will be recognized by either a macOS or Linux/Windows guest operating system.
If you would like to share your experiences, feel free to leave a comment or reach out by filling the contact form.
Disclaimer: Although ESXi installs and runs on the Apple 2019 Mac Pro 7,1 it is currently not certified on the VMware HCL. There are no timelines on the certification due to challenges with COVID-19.
Radeon Pro W5700X MPX Module
Thanks to fellow reader Ned who recently reached out and shared his experience with the Radeon Pro W5700x MPX Module from Apple. Ned's initial attempt to passthrough the GPU to a macOS guest caused it to kernel panice when loading the Radeon Framebuffer Driver (RadeonX6000Framebuffer). I had suggested using a GPU that was on VMware's HCL to see if that made a difference or experiment by using a Windows guest to see if the behavior was the same.
It turns out that by using a Windows 10 (64-Bit) guest, Ned was successful in passing through the Radeon GPU to the VM and this looks to be an issue with the macOS driver, at least running in a VM. This testing was done using latest ESXi 7.0 Update 1b release.
Great to read that, but passthrough for all platform can be much better than a mac. Like using an Asrock.. to pass the main pci you have to turn off the onboard one. Perhaps a ‘sink’ function that can patch the esxi console could be a way somehow ?
This post is for folks who have a need to virtualize macOS guests and need GPU passthrough capabilities. Per Apple and VMware’s EULA, to legally virtualize macOS, you must use Apple Hardware. This post is NOT geared towards folks who do not have these requirements and can run generic x86 platforms where GPU passthrough is well understood 🙂
Thanks, William! What’s the forecast for ESXi on Apple Silicon? It looks like the new tech is going to give everyone a run for their money in the performance for the buck department. Thanks!
No insights for ESXi on Apple Silicon but I know the Fusion folks are working on their initial enablement https://twitter.com/VMwareFusion/status/1326229094648832000
That’ll be a good place to start. Thanks!
About HCL: I am having quite some discussions with support about HCL certification of Mac Pro. They tell me that Apple has to do the certification. Is that true? I find it kind of strange that Apple has interest in VMware HCL certification at all!
VMware Support is correct, hardware certification of ANY kind is usually performed by the hardware vendor themselves. They determine which platform and subsequent components they wish to certify and that’s how the HCL is updated. Apple is an outlier as they have not join VMware’s partner program nor shown any interests in applying for hardware certification which would also include GPUs. That is why these efforts have mostly been community driven and VMware doing its best to support our customers. If you have any feedback/concerns in these areas and you have an Enterprise agreement with Apple, I highly recommend you share it with the account team.
Hmm if that is so who certified the old Mac Pro / new Mac Mini? Support is not helping (not even try to help) since they say that Apple needs to put the system on the VMware HCL – which they will not do i guess.
Markus, as I’ve stated in my previous reply, in case it wasn’t clear. VMware has taken on the responsibility of certifying these platforms to better support our customers. This is not ideal for number of reasons.
The 2019 Mac Pro is currently NOT certified per my note in the blog post. So they can NOT help and even if it was certified, there are no plans for GPU passthrough certification
Hi William! Since you mentioned GPU passthrough, any hopes of VMware realising a Horizon agent for Macs one day? It would be cool to use some Mac-VDI in a few use cases.
I’m not aware of any plans to do so from our End User Computing Business Units