MAC mini ESXi Custer (5.1a)
December 2nd, 2012Over this weekend I had the chance to play in my VMWare lab at home a bit. Earlier this year, I was able to cobble together a small lab using mac mini’s. I originally did this with VMWare 5.0 but I’ve been wanting to play with 5.1 for a while now so I decided to go ahead and upgrade this weekend. I also respun an iso that includes the network drivers needed for mac mini on ESXi 5.1a.
(tl;dr??? - ESXi-5.1a-macmini-838463.iso )
(Let me preface this this with that I am not a VMWare specialized guy. I touch it a lot at work but it’s extremely superficial. YMMV on what I write below)
After reading through some of VMWare’s kb, I found that there are a few ways of going from 5.0 to 5.1. I ended up trying two complete different ones just to learn a little. Plus, I wanted to keep my users happy… (Ok, other than maybe a minecraft server for my kids and a few of their friends, there really isn’t any “mission critical” apps running in my home network. I wanted to minimize any downtime while I did the upgrade to get some idea of what’s involved. Five nines FTW.)
Method 1: VmWare Update Manager (VUM)
So according to the link above, VMware’s recommended method is using the VUM. Ok, easy enough… I remember using something similar to this when I upgraded from 4.0 to 4.1 a few years ago. Just an app you download, ran, it connected to the host, downloaded the upgrade files, upgraded, rebooted, done, easy. I didn’t use this when I went to 5 as I was needing to slipstream drivers into the installer (mac mini) and was starting a new cluster anyway. Well…it’s not as simple anymore (or at least I couldn’t find the old updater method anymore). The VUM is now a persistent server app, requires a 64bit server OS (that’s not a dc), and a full on database instance (express for smaller installs).
Initially, I was frustrated after finding this out… but… I read some more about the process and this actually ended up being pretty cool. VMWare was able to integrate the VUM into vcenter and the esxi client. After spinning up a 2008 server and upgrading the vcenter appliance from 5.0 to 5.1a, the install of VUM was fairly straight forward. I might add that I am using the vcenter appliance and not the windows server version). I’d guess that most orgs use the normal vcenter server and already have a dedicated 2008 running there. Following this logic, it makes sense that you find the VUM installer on the ISO for the windows version of vcenter. Fortunately for me, VUM works with the appliance version too. During the install you just point it at your vcenter appliance ip and it does the integration for you. On the esxi client, a plugin is published that you select and download from the plugin menu. This adds several admin screens to esxi client to let you build profiles for updating your hosts. It allows you to not just do major updates (i.e. 5.0 -> 5.1), but also lets you setup polices for pushing out minor patches. Using this method I was able to migrate 2 of my 3 mac mini’s over to 5.1 with no issue.
I wasn’t sure if it was keeping the Broadcom drivers for the ethernet that I originally embedded in the 5.0 installer, or if 5.1 simply had those drivers natively now, but everything worked fine. I may never have found the answer to how that worked if one of the mac minis didn’t like the automated process. So on to method 2… manual upgrade…
Method 2: Manual install from host console
So this is VMWare esxi 101. Boot off install CD, configure, reboot, done. If the installer finds a preexisting install, it will upgrade it for you. Nothing magical here. In my setup though.. I am running on non supported hardware. When I did 5.0, I had to embed drivers in the ISO so that the installer could see the NIC and load up. Would I need to do this with 5.1 ?
Attempt number one involved attached a usb DVD drive (apple) and just booting off that. Maybe I’d get lucky and 5.1a has broadcom drivers already. The install went normal, I was able to pass all the validation steps and it looked like it saw my NIC. Yay. Easy. Well…not really. After the install finished, the host rebooted, I set my ip addresses… but no network connectivity. VMWare said the link was up… my switch said the link was up… no connectivity. Well shit… Apparently the VUM maintained drivers during the upgrade. Manually did not.
So I went back (after I got a beer), got the updated version of the ESXi customizer (2.7.1) and respun my ISO using 5.1a as the source and the same broadcom driver bundle I used with 5.0.
This (ESXi-5.1a-macmini-838463.iso) worked like a charm. I didn’t even bother loading it to a USB drive. I just burned a cd and booted from a USB attached drive on the mini.
December 2nd, 2012 at 3:29 pm
does this ISO contain drivers for ISO or eSATA? would love to add additional storage to the MacMini(s).
thanks
scott
@the_sboss
December 2nd, 2012 at 4:10 pm
I didn’t add anything besides the broadcom driver. It’s fairly easy to map nfs or iscsi targets though. Just build a openfiler/freenas server and store all your vm’s there. This lets you play with vMotion too.
December 2nd, 2012 at 4:33 pm
I am trying to retire my really old hardware that my freenas runs on. Especially since my one VMware box is the only thing that uses it. I would like to consolidate down to one box. One box that runs esxi and if I need NSF again to bring up a freenas vm.
Thanks!!
December 2nd, 2012 at 7:16 pm
Hi guys,
I have run into a different issue, I have got esxi 5.1 installed and working on my mac mini server. The problem I have is that after I reboot the machine the esxi5.1 wont boot automatically, it comes with a blank screen with just a line saying “no boot device found”. The only way to get around this is to hold the option key while rebooting and then manually selecting the EFI disk that has the ESXI installed and from there on everything works as expected.
Options I tried:
I tried removing the other harddrive – didnt work (same issue as described above).
I tried installing it on a USB stick -didnt work (same issue as described above).
I tried installing mountatin lion on the installed harddrive and Esxi5.1 on the USB drive – didnt work, the machine boots into the mountain lion and even the attached USB is not available as an option to select as a start up disk in the mountain lion OS.
Currently I have the esxi 5.1 installed on the USB stick and the internal harddrive have Mountain lion installed. On reboot it boots directly into mountain lion unless you hold the option key and manually select the USB with EXSI 5.1.
Any help will be highly appreciated.
Regards
Bobby
December 2nd, 2012 at 9:34 pm
That’s an odd one. It seemed (for me) that the ESXi installer always setup the boot options so that it would work fine. I’ve setup probably 8-10 installs on minis and haven’t seen that issue. Perhaps you had a bootcamp install or some other setup where the bios boot options are not default anymore? I did a quick search and found a few forum posts that say you can edit the default boot device from the boot menu. Have you tried that? Another option would be to locate the method for defaulting the bios options on that hardware.