help with ESXi on a mac pro??

[italiano40]

i have two 2 HDD bays with HDD's in them and one is a 1 td and one is a 500gb, the 1tb has ESXi with a couple of linux servers now on the 500gb drive it has mac OSX server installed is their some way of pointing ESXi to that 500gb and running mac OSX thru ESXi???

 

[foshizzle]

Basically, no. You could try running vmware converter to convert the mac install to a VM but I doubt it'll work on something other than windows or linux. I'm not even sure Mac OS X is supported on ESXi. It should work on fusion or parallels, but I'm not sure about ESXi. You could try installing it fresh on ESXi.

 

[timswim78]

VMWare had OS X Server running in a VM at MacWorld in January of 2008. There was a lot of hype initially, and then things fell silent. Here is their original post, if you want to research it some more.
http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/01/virtual-leopa-1.html

 

[RandomKamikaze]

Should also be pointed that you aren't allowed to run OS X (non-server) through virtualisation. It's in the EULA, for what that's worth.

VMWare Fusion will also actively refuse to install OS X (non-server) due to this. Don't know if ESXi will do the same

 

[foshizzle]

He is trying to get server to install anyway, so thats not the issue.

It really would be nice for VMware to support Mac OS x server on their ESXi platform. Apple announced a year ago that they were allowing Server to be virtualized, and I am very surprised that they have not extended it beyond Fusion. I love fusion, but I'd love to put an OS X server in my ESXi environment here.

On another note - server is now at one price, $499 for unlimited users for 10.6 Snow Leopard. Pretty good deal, especially after having just spent $5500 in the past year on licensing for two 2008 windows servers, 25 CALs, Exchange 2007 and 25 CALs for that. Waste of money if you ask me.
I'd link but I'm too lazy right now. Go to the server page on apple's site then click around, you'll find it.

 

[italiano40]

Yes i do want to install Mac OSX Server not just plain mac osx and when i get my new server i will report back if ESXi can install it i have also searched the web and found good information on it

 

[ScottishCaptain]

ESXi (3.5 or 4.0) does /not/ support Mac OS X Server.

VMware Fusion supports OS X Server, but in doing so they're running a lot of specific "tweaks" to the virtualization engine (vmware-vmx) that are strictly Fusion-only. Specifically SMC support and a bunch of APIC and CPUID tweaks.

I managed to get a really old, heavily patched custom kernel running on ESXi 4.0 (vSphere)- I think it was 10.5.4 or 10.5.5, and it booted, but there was no way to get Server on there or update it past 10.5.5 at the time, since the kernel was not stock.

As far as I know, there's no way to boot a stock Apple kernel on ESX/ESXi. You might be able to get the kernel to attempt to boot by kludging around with timeTracker.busMultiplier and timeTracker.apicBusHz, but I've never managed to get any further then ~5 seconds into the bootup (before Launchd starts) without a panic.

-SC

 

[assembled]

$5500 in the past year on licensing for two 2008 windows servers, 25 CALs, Exchange 2007 and 25 CALs for that. Waste of money if you ask me.

at that size you should have purchased SBS rather than the 'full' product, and SBS compares very well to OS-X Server esp if you want to run on server hardware such as a HP DL360 G5 with RAID5 built in, lights out management built in, hot swap powersupplies and fans etc...