So you have a quad core mac mini with 16GB of ram and you think to yourself “that would make a nice little vmware box, but I want to keep the OSX install on it and keep using it.”
Well that’s not a problem at all. Just bung vmware 5.5u2 on a usb stick and use the old option/alt key at poweron to access the EFI boot menu, then select the usb stick to boot from it (optionally use the ctrl key to set that as the default boot option) Then boot vmware and set it up to your tastes.
Once that’s done and you have added a Datastore (NFS ones are not supported for this), then you are ready to make the pRDM (physical Raw Disk mapping) file (so you can add the local disk to the apple osx VM we will later create).
Follow the steps at http://forza-it.co.uk/esxi-5-1-using-raw-device-mappings-rdm-on-an-hp-microserver
For me the process looked like :-
Login to the mac mini esx server with ssh (you did enable ssh in the troubleshooting menu?)
(FYI, the volume”Lunny”, that is referenced below, is an ISCSI Lun that’s attached from my NAS. This is also key to getting the following part to work as it adds a form of persistent storage that VMware will work with.)
cd /dev/disks
/dev/disks # ls -l | grep APPLE
-rw——- 1 root root 1000204886016 May 22 11:39 t10.ATA_____APPLE_HDD_HTS461001A9A662_____________________J80808AAAAAAAB
/dev/disks # vmkfstools -z /vmfs/devices/disks/t10.ATA_____APPLE_HDD_HTS461001A9A662_____________________J80808AAAAAAAB /vmfs/volumes/Lunny/MAC1TBRDS.vmdk
Now this mapping file is ready to use. So lets create our VM, login to vmware and create a new custom vm, set the guest OS type to other and the Version to 10.7, set the cpu settings to at 2 cores, set mem to 4GB, once your at the select a disk section use the “use and existing virtual disk” option so you can select that pRDM vmdk file.
Finnish up the vm creation and review your settings then finalise it. Now you have an OSX vm that will boot from your local disk and load your existing OSX install from that.
Congratulations you have re-purposed that mac mini and now it has a new role as a vmware server.
Mine is running my osx vm and also my vCenter vm. Adding a thunderbolt Ethernet port and trunking that together with the built in port makes the mac mini even more potent in the home lab.
Infonomicon 