My work mate here has had the same problem. He thinks the OS knows it's on a VM and so doesn't allow the Configuration Profiles.

Looking forward to someone out there showing that he is wrong :)

Regards,

David

David your mate might be correct, all my VM's have a different UUID than regular macs, they're all like

**00000000-0000-1000-8000**-000C29510BFB

not sure if this is related. anyone else seeing this?

Virtual machines don't seem to work with Apple's push notifications. I'm not certain of the "why", but I suspect it's because OS X VMs generally have serial numbers that were not generated by Apple.

In my VM testing, I've found that anything involving having a Apple-registered hardware serial number / sending hardware serial number back to Apple doesn't work in VMs. This includes iCloud services like Find My Mac and Messages and it also applies to getting hardware-specific OS installers via Recovery HD. It may also apply to profiles whose installation relies on Apple's APN service sending a push notification.

One thing you could try is exporting the profiles from your Casper server and installing them using the profiles command. If installing the profiles works using the command-line installation method, then your issue is APN.

@rtrouton i have to agree with your assessment, thanks for sharing as i was going nuts trying to figure this out.

i'll mark your answer as "Answer"

thanks

Hopefully this info helps other people struggling with this. There is a workaround to get push notifications to work on Mac OS computers hosted on ESXi, you need to get a shorter serial number. The ones generated by default are just too long to work with Apple's push notification service. ESXi 5.5 allows generating a 12 character serial number, I don't believe this works with 5.1 or earlier.

The trick is to enter the following key/value pair into the vmx file.

"SMBIOS.use12CharSerialNumber" = "TRUE"

You can also do this in vSphere Client:
1. Shut down your VM.
2. "Edit virtual machine settings"
3. "Options" tab.
4. "Advanced" > "General"
5. "Configuration Parameters" : "Configuration Parameters..."
6. "Add Row"
7. Name: SMBIOS.use12CharSerialNumber
8. Value: TRUE
9. "OK" : "OK" : "Power on the virtual machine"

In my testing, making this change immediately enables MDM. No jamf manage/recon needed. On next recon, the serial number will update in the JSS. I only tested in Casper 9.3, I don't know how previous versions will work.

I'm using VMWare Fusion 5. I opened the imageName.vmx file and added:

SMBIOS.use12CharSerialNumber = "TRUE"

Now the model number is shorter and it installs my configuration profiles.

In my case the generated serial contained an "+".
I just adjusted the serial manually in the vm settings using

serialNumber = "SERIAL-NUMBER"

I simply replaced the + with an letter.

ESXi 6.7, Mojave 10.14.6 vmx
added 2 rows under vSphere client:
SMBIOS.use12CharSerialNumber = TRUE
serialNumber = "SERIAL-NUMBER"

still can't get the machine enroll on Jamf Pro 10.16 .
any suggestions?

Kind Regards,
Meir

I just had the same issue with my VirtualBox Mac running Catalina. I had set the serial number to a three digit serial which resulted in the configuration profiles not getting installed on the machine. I changed to a 12 character made up serial number and it worked.

VBoxManage setextradata "Catalina" "VBoxInternal/Devices/efi/0/Config/DmiSystemSerial" "XXXXXXXXXXXX"