VMware has announced on August 3rd that vSphere ESXi 7.x is the last version supporting Apple Mac platform.
https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/88698
Reasom is that Apple is moving away from the x86 processor platform.
With 7.0 the MacOS platform will be supported until EOL.
Guest OS support for Mac is discontinued, too. macOS guest operating system may only be operated in VMs on vSphere ESXi hosts installed on Apple Mac hardware
+21
Just read about this will be interesting to see what they do next for Apple.
+7
Wonder if they will port ESXi to work on Apple Silicon if the interest is there.
+14
The MacOS support always looked a bit odd, as you were required to run it on Apple hardware. Thanks for sharing
+22
The MacOS support always looked a bit odd, as you were required to run it on Apple hardware. Thanks for sharing
Was going to mention this. It gets more interesting when you look at what virtualising the macOS has become. Now Apple have their M1 & M2 processors, this isn’t just “standard ARM”, and the OS relies on Apple silicon specific features to run.
As
With Apple Silicon this gets complicated. Starting with the M1 and then continuing with M2, fewer components aren’t Apple custom designs. Which means VMware creating drivers for all of this.
Wait though, it gets weirder! You can run macOS VMs on Apple silicon already, BUT they’re not running identically to a physical machine’s macOS install, they’re actually using generic ARM64 builds as nothing exists yet that can virtualise an M CPU, so the M kernels don’t run!
For more information read this:
With the inability to natively virtualise an M1 CPU. The complete change of architectures (that still is awaiting an M series Mac Pro), I gotta say, I don’t blame VMware on this one! But never say never I guess, ESXi for ARM exists after all…
+17
Even if VMware manages to solve the technical issues and were able to virtalize the M processors and macOS based on them, then Apples licensing will prohibit this…. I am afraid that Apple does not really want to run macOS VMs on another environment than it's own….
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