mac mini

ESXi on the new 2018 Apple Mac Mini

11/09/2018 by William Lam 28 Comments

Thanks to the Green Mini Host (Apple Mac Mini hosting and collocation provider) who were the first to publicly confirm that latest release of ESXi (6.7 Update 1) works on the recently announced 2018 Apple Mac Mini.

Conforming @VMware #ESXi runs on the new Mac Mini 2018! #macmini2018 @vGhetto @lamw pic.twitter.com/DRqQ4lsWn5

— Green Mini host (@macminihost) November 7, 2018

For vSphere/vSAN Home Lab enthusiasts, the price of the new Mac Mini, especially when it is fully loaded is probably a tough sale. However, for customers developing on MacOS including iOS development, CI/CD, build farms, gaming, etc. which benefit from running on vSphere. For these customers, support for ESXi on the new Mac Mini is extremely interesting, especially with the updated hardware giving these systems a significant boost in performance even when comparing to the current Mac Pro 6,1 and iMac Pro models. In fact, I had number of folks ping me after Apple introduced it during their keynote asking if ESXi would work on the Mini's.

Disclaimer: Apple Mac Mini (both old and new) hardware are NOT officially supported by VMware. The only officially supported Apple hardware platform is the Mac Pro 6,1 or Mac Pro 5,1. For more details, please refer to VMware's Hardware Compatibility List.

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

10/31/2018 by William Lam 2 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.

Thunderbolt to 10GbE Network Adapters for ESXi

03/15/2018 by William Lam 4 Comments

I was recently made aware of this article in which the author, Karim Elatov, had successfully demonstrated the use of a Sonnett Thunderbolt 2 to 10 Gigabit Ethernet Adapter with ESXi running on an Apple Mac Mini. As far as I am aware of, this may be the first public confirmation that such a device would work with ESXi, not to mention having it functional on the Mac Mini. I know in past years, there have been unconfirmed reports on various forums mentioning a Thunderbolt to 10GbE solution that works with ESXi but it was unclear on whether custom drivers were needed or if it would even work with newer versions of ESXi.

This topic has been popular amongst our customers who virtualize Apple MacOS on vSphere. In fact, several years back I had written an article on Thunderbolt Storage for ESXi, which includes a number of solutions that our customers have implemented to provide remote storage for their vSphere infrastructure running on either an Apple XServe, Mac Pro or Mac Mini. Questions around a functional Thunderbolt to 10GbE has definitely been asked about, but I had never heard from any customer who have had a successful story to share, at least until now.

From Karim's post, it looks like he was able to get this working using ESXi 6.0 but it was unclear if there was anything he needed to do to get the device recognized. I reached out to Karim and he was able to confirm that the Thunderbolt device was recognized by ESXi without any additional driver installation. In fact, if you look at this console output on his blog, you will see that it simply uses the inbox Intel ixgbe driver. I had also asked if Karim tried this with the latest version of ESXi, which is currently at 6.5 Update 1. Karim was kind enough to perform one additional test for me which was to confirm the device would still work with the latest ESXi release, which you can see for yourself in the screenshot below.

UPDATE (02/04/19) - Chad Moon recently shared his experiences on getting 10GbE support with an Intel NUC using the OWC Mercury Helios 3, Thunderbolt3 to PCIe expansion enclosure

Using vSphere Auto Deploy to Netboot ESXi onto Apple Mac Hardware

01/17/2017 by William Lam Leave a Comment

Last week I published an article that demonstrated for the first time on how to netboot an ESXi installation onto Apple Mac Hardware. As you can imagine, this was very exciting news for our VMware/Apple customers, who historically have not had this capability before. Customers can now automate and install ESXi over the network onto their Apple Mac Hardware just like you would for other non-Apple hardware.

With the ability to boot ESXi over the network for Apple Mac Hardware, it is now also possible for customers to take advantage of the vSphere Auto Deploy feature. Auto Deploy allows customers to easily and quickly provision ESXi hosts at scale and integrates directly with vCenter Server to automatically join and apply specific defined host configuration policies. This is a great time to check out Auto Deploy, especially with all the new enhancements that were introduced in vSphere 6.5 like custom script bundles for example.

Below are the instructions on how to setup Auto Deploy to work with Apple Mac Hardware.

How to Netboot install ESXi onto Apple Mac Hardware?

01/13/2017 by William Lam 9 Comments

The ability to perform an ESXi Scripted Installation over the network has been a basic capability for non-Apple hardware customers since the initial release of classic ESX. However, for customers who run ESXi on Apple Mac Hardware (first introduced in vSphere 5.0), being able to remotely boot and install ESXi over the network has not been possible and customers could only dream of this capability which many of us have probably taken for granted.

Unlike traditional scripted network installations which commonly uses Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE), Apple Mac Hardware actually uses its own developed Boot Service Discover Protocol (BSDP) which ESXi and other OSses do not support. In addition, there are very few DHCP servers that even support BSDP (at least this may have been true 4 years ago when I had initially inquired about this topic). It was expected that if you were going to Netboot (equivalent of PXE/Kickstart in the Apple world) a server that you would be running a Mac OS X system. Even if you had set this up, a Netboot installation was wildly different from a traditional PXE installation and it would be pretty difficult to near impossible to get it working with an ESXi image. With no real viable solution over the years, it was believed that a Netboot installation of ESXi onto Mac Hardware just may not be possible.

tl;dr - If you are interested in the background to the eventual solution, continue reading. If not and you just want the goods, jump down a bit further. Though, I do think it is pretty interesting and worth getting the full context 🙂

Home Labs made easier with VSAN 6.0 + USB Disks

03/04/2015 by William Lam 23 Comments

VSAN 6.0 includes a large number of new enhancements and capabilities that I am sure many of you are excited to try out in your lab. One of the challenges with running VSAN in a home lab environment (non-Nested ESXi) is trying to find a platform that is both functional and cost effective. Some of the most popular platforms that I have seen customers use for running VSAN in their home labs are the Intel NUC and the Apple Mac Mini. Putting aside the memory constraints in these platforms, the number of internal disk slots for a disk drive is usually limited to two. This would give you just enough to meet the minimal requirement for VSAN by having at least a single SSD and MD.

If you wanted to scale up and add additional drives for either capacity purposes or testing out a new configurations, you are pretty much out of luck, right? Well, not necessary. During the development of VSAN 6.0, I came across a cool little nugget from one of the VSAN Engineers where USB-based disks could be claimed by VSAN which could be quite helpful for testing in a lab environment, especially using the hardware platforms that I mentioned earlier.

For a VSAN home lab, using cheap consumer USB-based disks which you can purchase several TB's for less than a hundred dollars or so and along with USB 3.0 connectivity is a pretty cost effective way to enhance hardware platforms like the Apple Mac Mini and Intel NUCs.

Disclaimer: This is not officially supported by VMware and should not be used in Production or evaluation of VSAN, especially when it comes to performance or expected behavior as this is now how the product works. Please use supported hardware found on the VMware VSAN HCL for official testing or evaluations.

Below are the instructions on how to enable USB-based disks to be claimable by VSAN.

Step 1 - Disable the USB Arbitrator service so that USB devices can been seen by the ESXi host by running the following two commands in the ESXi Shell:

/etc/init.d/usbarbitrator stop
chkconfig usbarbitrator off

Step 2 - Enable the following ESXi Advanced Setting (/VSAN/AllowUsbDisks) to allow USB disks to be claimed by VSAN by running the following command in the ESXi Shell:

esxcli system settings advanced set -o /VSAN/AllowUsbDisks -i 1

Step 3 - Connect your USB-based disks to your ESXi host (this can actually be done prior) and you can verify that they are seen by running the following command in the ESXi Shell:

vdq -q

Step 4 - If you are bootstrapping vCenter Server onto the VSAN Datastore, then you can create a VSAN Cluster by running "esxcli vsan cluster new" and then contribute the storage by adding the SSD device and the respective USB-based disks using the information from the previous step in the ESXi Shell:

esxcli vsan storage add -s t10.ATA_____Corsair_Force_GT________________________12136500000013420576 -d mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0 -d mpx.vmhba33:C0:T0:L0 -d mpx.vmhba34:C0:T0:L0 -d mpx.vmhba40:C0:T0:L0

If we take a look a the VSAN configurations in the vSphere Web Client, we can see that we now have 4 USB-based disks contributing storage to the VSAN Disk Group. In this particular configuration, I was using my Mac Mini which has 4 x USB 3.0 devices that are connected and providing the "MD" disks and one of the internal drives that has an SSD. Ideally, you would probably want to boot ESXi from a USB device and then claim one of the internal drives along with 3 other USB devices for the most optimal configuration.

As a bonus, there is one other nugget that I discovered while testing out the USB-based disks for VSAN 6.0 which is another hidden option to support iSCSI based disks with VSAN. You will need to enable the option called /VSAN/AllowISCSIDisks using the same method as enabling USB-based disk option. This is not something I have personally tested, so YMMV but I suspect it will allow VSAN to claim an iSCSI device that has been connected to an ESXi host and allow it to contribute to a VSAN Disk Group as another way of providing additional capacity to VSAN with platforms that have restricted number of disk slots. Remember, neither of these solutions should be used beyond home labs and they are not officially supported by VMware, so do not bother trying to do anything fancy or running performance tests, you are just going to let your self down and not see the full potential of VSAN 🙂