Esxi Mac Hack

  • Welcome back hackers, today we’re going to be visiting a subject that many of you may be familiar with, building a lab. Specifically, building a virtual lab. Normally you would use something like Oracle’s VirtualBox or VMWare Player, but today we’re going to take it a step further and use VMWare’s ESXi.ESXi is a hypervisor which comes in the form of a server operating system.
  • Mar 13, 2020  Update 2. In early 2016, VMware began including the embedded HTML5 host client for managing ESXi in version 6.0 U2 from your web browser. Meant to connect to and manage single ESXi clients, it’s a great solution for users getting started with a dedicated Mac (like a quad-core mini or a Mac Pro) running VMware at MacStadium.

UPDATE 18/10/16: Changed to support 10.12

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. 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. I've been running my macOS desktop in an ESXi VM for over a year now. I came from a hackintosh, but got tired of the fragility of some upgrades. Some notes on this setup: - Apple supports macOS running inside of ESXi. Officially, only on Apple host hardware (i.e. A Mac Pro, which is on the ESXi.

For one reason or another you need macOS on ESXi tells you that it isn't possible unless your host is a Mac itself. That isn't particularly true...

Esxi Mac Hack Tool

The ESXi Unlocker

Thanks to Donk over at InsanelyMac, a patch has been created to install macOS on ESXi (5.5 only) but also supports Workstation (8, 9, 10), Player (4, 5, 6) and Fusion (4, 5, 6). Have a look at it here or try out version 2 which supports Workstation 11, Player 7 Fusion 7 and ESXi 6.

Disclaimer: The following process potentially violates Apple’s End User License Agreement for macOS. Please check the Agreement before following these steps.

Setup

Here is my current setup and what I have:

  • Whitebox ESXi host
  • macOS Sierra 10.12 (but any will work) - NOTE: lags heaps but can be slightly tolerable with the beamoff application.

Install the Unlocker Patch

For this, I used the Windows vSphere client instead of the web client

1. Connect directly to your ESXi host instead of vCenter

2. Unzip the unlock-all-v130.zip file

3. Open a datastore (Configuration > Hardware > Storage) by right-clicking it and selecting 'Browse Datastore...'

4. Copy the 'esxi' folder to the datastore by selecting 'Upload Folder' making note of the warning of replacing any existing folders you may have with the same name

5. Enable and connect to SSH on the host (Configuration > Software > Security Profile > Services > Properties > SSH > Options > Start > OK)

6. Change directory over to your VMFS datastore

7. I recommend changing the name of the unlocker's folder to something else such as osx_unlocker

8. Go into the unlocker folder afterwards

Esxi Mac Os X

9. Make the install and uninstall file executable

10. Run the install script file

11. Reboot your ESXi host

Create the ISO image

Esxi Mac Unlocker

If you have 10.9 or greater, you will need a Mac to create the ISO.

If you have a Mac or using 10.9 and greater

For macOS or OS X 10.6 to 10.12, you can use this Mac only script to create the ISO if the InstallESD.img or Install.app is in the Applications folder: https://gist.github.com/calvinbui/3cc1594d85583077a88d6d60eac01aa8

Windows/Linux

Only supports 10.8 and below.

  1. Download OS X installation however you wish. Apple provide it free on their Mac App Store such as this: Yosemite Installation
  2. Browse the 'Install OS X.app' and extract the InstallESD.dmg file under /Contents/SharedSupport/
  3. Follow one of the options below depending on your operating system:

Windows - Convert the DMG file to an ISO using dmg2img. I used version 1.65.

Linux (Ubuntu) - Convert the DMG to ISO also using dmg2img (sudoapt-get install dmg2img)

Create the Virtual Machine and Install

Make sure to select Apple Mac OS X as your Guest Operating System.

Power on the VM and mount the ISO image to install.

If you get the error 'darwin11_64guest is not supported', try starting the VM directly from the host instead of vCenter.

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.

Mac

The Workaround

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.

  1. Extract unlocker206.zip to a folder on your computer.
  2. Upload the contents to a datastore on your ESXi host.
  3. Put your host in maintenance mode.
  4. Enable the ESXi shell by following these directions if you haven’t already done so.
  5. Open the ESXi shell.
  6. 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.

  7. Make the install script executable.
  8. Run the install script.
  9. Reboot the ESXi host:
  10. Exit maintenance mode, and enjoy.
  11. 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.

  1. Extract unlocker-all-v130.zip to a folder on your computer.
  2. Upload the contents to a datastore on your ESXi host.
  3. Put your host in maintenance mode.
  4. Enable the ESXi shell by following these directions if you haven’t already done so.
  5. Open the ESXi shell.
  6. 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.

  7. Make the install script executable.
  8. Run the install script.
  9. Reboot the host.
  10. Exit Maintenance Mode, and enjoy.
  11. Use the darwin.iso file in the tools folder to mount and install VMware Tools.

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 Hacked

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.