Mac ESX specs?

[roiegat]

So we're thinking of building a virtual Mac environment and since we don't have any ESX's running on Mac Hardware, I've been tasked with looking into it. So what are you guys using to run your ESX's with Mac hardware so you can create Mac VDI's on?

[thoule]

I use a MacPro . Sadly it has only a 256GB drive in it and 12GB ram. I'm able to make and run 3 low-end Macs for testing. I ordered an external hard drive and more ram so that should help me once it comes in.

To plan for your needs, think about how many Macs you want to test with. And disk space depends on what you install. For me, my 256GB drive is pretty full after three machines with basic OSs and basic suite of apps + 1 snapshot. Perhaps budget 150GB per basic machine? And 6 or 8GB ram per machine? Ram is, of course, concurrently running machines. And that depends on how many people will be using the server.

[roiegat]

@thoule Is it one of the newer round MacPro or the old huge MacPro?

Still trying to figure out how many concurrent machines will be on it...minimum would be 2.

Good info to start with. Thanks!

[donmontalvo]

You'll want to bookmark this blog, one of the VMWare engineers....

[jonscott]

Not that it'll help I'm guessing, but I've been running ESXi on Xserves for the past 5 or 6 years or so, as part of my regular cluster -- so connected to NetApp SAN for storage, and loaded up with max RAM. They've worked very well to host our Win/*nix/OS X clients.

I've migrated nearly everything to Linux now, so the Xserves are going away and being replaced by HP. I'll probably keep one Xserve ESXi host around for awhile, but as far as I'm aware they can't run anything past v5.1.

[mjsanders]

Rich Trouton has posted serveral articles about ESXi on Mac Minis. He prefers the 2012 model (Core i7). Minis are all limited to 16 GB, the Mac Pro (all models) can have much more, but are several times the prices. Tough choice: One 8-core Mac Pro with64 GB and 512 GB SSD, or 3 quadcore i7 Mac Mini's with 16 GB and 512GB ssd each.

[Olivier]

Isn't it forbidden to run MacOSX as guest OS, if the host OS is not also MacOSX? Written in the EULA http://images.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/OSX1011.pdf :

to install, use and run up to two (2) additional copies or instances of the Apple Software within virtual operating system environments on each Mac Computer you own or control that is already running the Apple Software

It is also forbidden to run MacOSX on a non-Apple hardware, so virtualizing MacOSX on HP servers is not allowed :

to download, install, use and run for personal, non-commercial use, one (1) copy of the Apple Software directly on each Apple-branded computer running OS X Yosemite, OS X Mavericks, OS X Mountain Lion, OS X Lion or OS X Snow Leopard (“Mac Computer”) that you own or control.

So as ESX is not an Apple software, and as the host OS must be an Apple product to run a virtualized OSX, you can only run MacOSX inside VMware Fusion if you really want to use a VMware product. Of course, nothing prevents you to run ESX on a Mac hardware if you want to virtualize Windows or Linux ;-).

Or am I wrong?

[donmontalvo]

We usually install ESXi on spare MPs with a ton of RAM and only run up to 2 VMs at one time. #eula