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Many of you may have wanted to run a Mac OS X virtual machine in your vSphere setup but get hit with the error that darwin11–64Guest is not supported, as outlined in VMware KB 2006093. As the KB explains that this is because you must be running Apple certified hardware to run a Mac OS X virtual machine. I’m sure that this has to do with the licensing of the OS X product. But you may want to run a vm or two to test software in your environment.
The Workaround
Luckily the heavy lifting to get around this has been done by InsanelyMac user Donk. He has created an unlocker tool for non-Apple hardware to be able to boot Mac OS X virtual machines. His tool works for other versions of VMware like Workstation but I’m going to focus on using it for ESXi.
There are two different versions of his unlocker utility, one for ESXi 5.0/5.1/5.5 and another for ESXi 6.0. Make sure that you use the appropriate utility for the version of your ESXi host.
How It’s Done
ESXi 6.0
Download Mac OS X Unlocker for VMware V2 (currently V2.0.6) from the InsanelyMac download page.
- Extract unlocker206.zip to a folder on your computer.
- Upload the contents to a datastore on your ESXi host.
- Put your host in maintenance mode.
- Enable the ESXi shell by following these directions if you haven’t already done so.
- Open the ESXi shell.
- Navigate to the directory on the datastore where the unlocker was uploaded to:
Where Datastore is the datastore name where the patch file was uploaded to, and DirectoryName is the directory you created on the datastore.
- Make the install script executable.
- Run the install script.
- Reboot the ESXi host:
- Exit maintenance mode, and enjoy.
- Use the darwin.iso file in the tools folder to mount and install VMware Tools.
Vsphere Web Client
ESXi 5.0/5.1/5.5
Download Mac OS X Unlocker for VMware (currently V1.3.0) from the InsanelyMac download page.
- Extract unlocker-all-v130.zip to a folder on your computer.
- Upload the contents to a datastore on your ESXi host.
- Put your host in maintenance mode.
- Enable the ESXi shell by following these directions if you haven’t already done so.
- Open the ESXi shell.
- Navigate to the directory on the datastore where the unlocker was uploaded to:
Where Datastore is the datastore name where the patch file was uploaded to, and DirectoryName is the directory you created on the datastore.
- Make the install script executable.
- Run the install script.
- Reboot the host.
- Exit Maintenance Mode, and enjoy.
- Use the darwin.iso file in the tools folder to mount and install VMware Tools.
Installing Mac OS X
You have to follow certain instructions to install Mac OS X from the installation media. It’s not complicated but it’s not straight forward either. You can view these instructions on the VMware website:
Summary
Vmware Vsphere Client For Mac Os X Download 10 11 4
This quick little fix has been working for me on two virtual machines running Mac OS X 10.10. In the two weeks I’ve been running them I’ve yet to have any issues, performance or otherwise, with using this fix or using the virtual machines. I hope this article helps solve the issue of running Mac OS X on non-certified non-Apple hardware.