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GPU passthrough with ESXi on the Apple 2019 Mac Pro 7,1

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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.

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Virtually Speaking Podcast: MacOS Virtualization and MacStadium

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Last week I had the pleasure to be on the Virtually Speaking Podcast (#1 Virtualization Podcast) to talk a little about the history and the use cases driving MacOS Virtualization in the Enterprise. In fact, this affects most if not every single organization that develops either an Apple MacOS and/or iOS application which includes VMware.

We also had a very special guest, Preston Lasebikan, a Systems Architect for MacStadium who gave us some insights into how they are supporting major Enterprise customers such as Dropbox, Capital One, Shopify, Box and many others using their Apple Mac Infrastructure which runs on VMware vSphere. If you never heard of MacStadium before, they are the largest service provider of Apple Mac Infrastructure as a Service in the world and there is a high probability your organization is already using them with you even knowing.

Click on the image below to listen 👇

Update on ESXi on Apple Mac Mini 2018 & Mac Pro 2019

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Although there has not been any news in some time regarding the support for ESXi on the latest Apple Mac Mini 2018 and the recently released Apple Mac Pro 2019, there has definitely been work happening behind the scenes at VMware. Today, I would like to share a pretty significant update as a result of some of these efforts.

MacOS Guest

One of the biggest issue which I had observed when using a T2-based Apple system with ESXi is that it would fail to boot a MacOS Guest and just keep rebooting the VM. I am very happy to announce that this issue has been resolved and ESXi can now properly recognize the Apple System Management Controller (SMC) device which is used as part of the MacOS Guest start up process. This now means a MacOS Guest will be able to properly boot on a T2-based Apple system.

Thunderbolt 3

Another impact of a T2-based Apple system with ESXi is that storage and networking devices connected to the Thunderbolt 3 ports are not visible. I am also happy to announce that this issue has been resolved and ESXi can now see PCIe devices that are attached to the Thunderbolt 3 ports.

An ESXi Advanced Setting change is required for Thunderbolt 3 to work correctly and the following command will need to be executed after installing ESXi:

esxcli system settings kernel set -s pciExperimentalFlags -v 16

Once the setting has been applied, a system reboot will be required and your PCIe devices will show up properly. In future, this additional configuration may not be required and can be detected based on the underlying hardware.

Both of the fixes mentioned above are included in the latest ESXi 6.7 Patch 02 (ESXi670-202004002) release which is available today! Hopefully this was the news that many of you have been waiting for 😀

UPDATE (08/27/20) - The Apple 2018 Mac Mini 8,1 is now officially supported with ESXi 6.7 Update 3 which requires the latest ESXi 6.7 Patch 03 which also incorporates automatically setting the ESXi Advanced Setting for Thunderbolt 3 access.

UPDATE (06/25/20) - The Apple 2018 Mac Mini 8,1 is now officially on the VMware HCL and is fully supported with ESXi 7.0b, which contains the fixes mentioned above. See note below on 06/23 for more information.

UPDATE (06/23/20) - ESXi 7.0b has just been released and contains fixes for both the MacOS guest boot issue support for Thunderbolt 3 devices which now enables support for the vSphere 7 release. One additional enhancement, customers no longer need to configure the ESXi Advanced Setting to enable Thunderbolt 3 support, this is now automatically configured based on detecting an Apple hardware system such as an Apple Mac Mini 2018 or Apple Mac Pro 2019. This is a patch release and you will need to go to the VMware Patch Portal site to download and apply the update.

Now, before you rush out to start deploying MacOS Guests on either the Mac Mini or Mac Pro, I do have to mention that neither the Mac Mini 2018 or the Mac Pro 2019 will be officially supported by VMware. Due to the current situation that we are all in with COVID-19, personnel access to VMware facilities like many other organizations has been severely restricted and/or prohibited. In fact, much of the early validation was done by yours truly using a Mac Mini 2018 which I had access to (Thanks Michael Roy) as Engineering did not have access to hardware during the shelter in place orders. This also means that certifications of these platforms is still on-going and until these systems are officially listed on VMware's HCL, they will not be officially supported by VMware.

Disclaimer: VMware currently does not officially support the Apple 2019 Mac Pro7,1

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ESXi on the new 2019 Apple Mac Pro

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Inquiries from customers on the support for ESXi on the latest 2019 Apple Mac Pro 7,1 has slowly been trickling in since the release of the system in late December. Officially, VMware currently does not support this platform and until we have a unit in-house to investigate further, this is the official stance.

With that said, several folks from the community have reached to me and shared some of their findings as it relates to ESXi with the new Mac Pro. A huge thanks goes out to Mike Rimmer who was able to go through the installation process and identified that the on-board NICs were not automatically detected by ESXI and the installation was unable to proceed. With the extensibility of the Mac Pro, Mike was able to add a supported Intel-based NIC to the system so that we could further understand the issue.

Upon closer investigation, it looks like the new Mac Pro uses two Aquantia based 10GbE NIC which is simliar to the 2018 Mac Mini which requires the Aquantia ESXi driver which was developed earlier last year.

AQC107 NBase-T/IEEE 802.3bz Ethernet Controller [AQtion]
Vendor ID: 0x1d6a
Device ID: 0x07b1

Although Mike did not have a chance to confirm this assumption, I did get validation from another customer who made the same observation when he attempted to install ESXi and once the Aquantia ESXi driver was incorporated into the latest ESXi 6.7 Update 3 image, both on-board NICs were automatically picked up by ESXi and installation was successful.

UPDATE (04/28/20) - ESXi 6.7 Patch 02 resolves a number of the issues mentioned below, please take a look at this blog post here for more details.

UPDATE 1 (01/16/19) - Thanks to our Graphics team who was kind enough to loan me their 2019 Mac Pro which literally came in yesterday! I had an idea which I wanted to run an experiment on which was to add a PCIe card w/M.2 NVMe SSD and see whether or not the Apple T2 Security Chip would have any affect on whether or not ESXi would be able to see the device. I was not super optimistic but I had a need for an additional M.2 device, so I went ahead and purchased a $15 PCIe adaptor. I was pleasantly surprise to see that ESXi not only detected the device but I was able to format a local VMFS volume and power up a functional VM! I guess this makes sense as only the Apple SSD's are cryptographically tied to the T2 chip and other PCIe devices would not be and this would allow customers to take advantage of this system right now for running non-MacOS guests (yes, T2 still affects the SMC).

I also ran another experiment by connecting a Thunderbolt 3 chassis which also had a supported M.2 NVMe to see if I was going to be lucky again. Although it looks like ESXi 6.7 Update 3 has resolved the PSOD'ing issue, ESXi was not able to see anything on the other end.

Note: Secure Boot must be disabled on the Mac Pro before you can install ESXi, you can find the instructions in this Apple KB.


This was certainly some good news but like the 2018 Mac Mini, the new 2019 Mac Pro also ships with the Apple T2 Security Chip which has proved challenging for ESXi as mentioned here along with some known caveats. For now, I would hold off making any purchases of the new Mac Pro if you intend to run ESXi. VMware does officially support ESXi on the last current generation of Mac Pro 6,1 along with Mac Mini 6,2 and Mac Mini 7,1 which are all on the official VMware HCL.

I will continue to update this article as new information and findings are shared with me.

vSphere 6.7 Update 2 add support back for Apple Mac Pro 6,1

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Last fall, support for vSphere 6.7 Update 1 on the Apple Mac Pro 6,1 was removed by VMware after finding out an updated version of the Apple Firmware prevented ESXi from booting up properly after upgrading. After some investigation and troubleshooting with several customers, VMware Engineering found a solution to workaround the problem and that fix is included in the latest vSphere 6.7 Update 2 release. As mentioned in the original blog post, this could also impact Apple Mac Mini's, which are not officially supported by VMware, but the fix should also apply to the Mac Mini.

In addition, the VMware HCL will also be updated shortly to reflect support for both vSphere 6.7 Update 2 along with the existing vSphere 6.7 support. For customers that have been waiting for features in vSphere 6.7 Update 1, you can finally upgrade to the latest release to get all the new features and benefits of vSphere.

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

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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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