- #MACMIN ESXI USB BOOT HOW TO#
- #MACMIN ESXI USB BOOT INSTALL#
- #MACMIN ESXI USB BOOT DRIVERS#
- #MACMIN ESXI USB BOOT DRIVER#
September 2021: A new KB article has been published: Removal of SD card/USB as a standalone boot device option (85685). comments powered by Disqus © 2021 Francis Augusto Medeiros-Logeay. (UPDATEd on to include information about the public availability of the driver.) Please enable JavaScript to view the comments powered by Disqus. (UPDATED on to correct info on Apple’s USB Ethernet adapter.) Leave a message in the comments if you too are contemplating running ESXi on a 10Gb Mac Mini! Using macOS VM’s could help us on our job, and the nice work of Aquantia is going to make that possible. Due to Apple licensing terms, we can only run a virtualized instance of macOS on Apple hardware. Booting with a Realtek-based USB-C Ethernet adapter just gets me a PSOD, and I don’t have a Realtek based USB adapter, so I couldn’t test the USB NIC driver.
#MACMIN ESXI USB BOOT DRIVER#
The Aquantia driver worked fine on the internal NIC, but I couldn’t make the Apple USB Ethernet adapters to work - these adapters apparently also use chipset from Aquantia these adapters use ASIX chipset ax88772A, not supported by the usb nic driver mentioned below, though it would be nice to test a legacy USB (not USB-C) adapter.But maybe it needs to be manually mounted? So it’s gonna be either SAN or installing the ESXi on one of these so that we can have some room for our VM’s. Hot-plugging to USB/USB-C doesn’t get the device to show up, and booting with anything, I mean, ANYTHING, connected to a USB-C port would lead me to the purple screen of death (PSOD). Booting with storage plugged on a legacy USB port would do nothing at best and prevent booting at worse (I got an error once saying something aobut multiboot not being supported). I couldn’t get any storage - USB or USB-C - to work.Of course, because the Mac Mini is not a supported platform for ESXi, it is uncertain how things are going to be after VMWare drops support for Vmklinux-based drivers. It’s great to know that the Mac Mini can be a viable option to run ESXi. From what I understand they are going to release the driver in the near future when things are ready on their side. The Aquantia folks did all the job, so I’m really grateful. I haven’t tested it exhaustively so far, let alone on a 10Gb switch, but so far, so good.
![macmin esxi usb boot macmin esxi usb boot](https://dsonstebo.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/vc8.png)
Well, it turns out they were, and today I finally got a candidate version that worked amazingly well on our Mac Mini’s.
#MACMIN ESXI USB BOOT DRIVERS#
On a desperate attempt, I contacted Aquantia to see if they were interesting into porting their Linux drivers to ESXi. After a while, with a proper configured CentOS environment, I started the process.īut then I’ve hitten a wall, and couldn’t go further.
![macmin esxi usb boot macmin esxi usb boot](https://www.ivobeerens.nl/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/IMG-8945.jpg)
#MACMIN ESXI USB BOOT HOW TO#
This was not an easy task, as VMware does not document all that well how to setup the environment for building up things.
#MACMIN ESXI USB BOOT INSTALL#
This means that we could not even install ESXi on the Mac Mini, as the installer seems to require a driver.įollowing some good tutorials here and here, I started an attempt to port the freely available Linux drivers from Aquantia.
![macmin esxi usb boot macmin esxi usb boot](https://www.poweradmin.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/esxi-boot-menu.jpg)
Nevertheless it was disappointing to see that a lot of things don’t work: It was great when we read here that it appeared that ESXi 6.7 runs fine on those machines. Our plan was to use this machine as a cluster, ideally running ESXi on them. My workplace aquired a few of the 2018 Mac Mini’s so that we could upgrade our support for macOS users. You can download the pre-release driver at this website.
![macmin esxi usb boot macmin esxi usb boot](https://i0.wp.com/virtuallywired.io/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/img_3897.jpg)
on esxi mac-mini aquantia ESXi 6.7 on the 2018 Mac Mini - networking.