I need to get a small VMware ESX/Virtual Infrastructure lab farm up and running, and I’d love to do it on Apple Mac Minis just for compactness and the silence. It has to be ESX/VI, not VMware Fusion or Parallels. Has anybody tried it, and if so, does the Mac Mini WiFi network card work?
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on Sep 8th, 2008 at
Did you ever get this to work?
on Sep 10th, 2008 at
I’m curious as well. I’m thinking of buying a mini and setting it up with a few virtual machines. Anyone knows if ESX runs on Mac mini hardware?
on Sep 10th, 2008 at
I haven’t bought a Mac Mini yet, but if somebody wants to donate me one, I can find out real fast.
on Sep 11th, 2008 at
The following excerpt from the VMWare datasheet doesn’t give me good hopes:
VMware ESX has been certified with industry-leading rack, tower and blade servers from Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, HP, IBM, NEC, Sun Microsystems and Unisys.
on Sep 11th, 2008 at
Certification on hardware is an expensive process that the hardware vendor typically pays for. Apple wouldn’t bother paying to get the Mini certified on ESX due to the low number of users.
on Oct 14th, 2008 at
i was trying to find out of boreness if someone did it yet and found your blog.
I haven´t tried it myself yet, but have a bit expirience in running esx on uncertified hardware - if you make sure to use common hardware which is typicly also used in the (low end) servers listed on vmwares compatibilty list, it works pretty charming. but you probably won´t get any support from vmware in case of troubles.
i havent compared the minis hardware with the compatibilty list (which is very annoying, since you have to find out seperatly which hardware runs on the servers listed)
but i seriously doubt that it is compatible. already the wacky LAN card was not supported in nearly any common linux distribution until a few months ago.
my mac mini runs a common linux distribution with xen enabled kernel - but that is far away from vmware´s useability.
@ work i run the very very cheap but uncertified Dell T105 tower server (sometimes available @ 150€) & boot from a 1gb usb stick and the guests reside on centralized NFS storage connected via multiple gigabit ethernet links - cheap, great performance and imho best for setting up a vmware lab or non mission critical servers
on Oct 28th, 2008 at
I have tried both ESX and ESXi 3.5 update 2 on Mac Minis with the same result, kernel panic.
We bought 4 at work to use for demos using VMs and have to either use VMware Server on a stripped out Linux, or Fusion in Mac OS.
on Oct 28th, 2008 at
Burke - thanks for commenting, I really appreciate that. I’ve been dying to know - but not dying enough to spend the $600 and then have yet another computer in the house that I don’t need.