The Mac Mini VMware ESXi 5 Server

The Mac Mini VMware ESXi 5 Server – Part 3 (Follow Up)

January 18th, 2012 // 9:31 pm @ Paraguin

This posting will get regular updates in regards to comments and questions that occur in the previous 2 sections. If you haven’t seen the other two sections, then please follow the links below

[Update for quick links 1/30/2012]

To make linking to the other pages easier….

Overview

From the numerous comments and questions from the Installation of the blog entry, we have decided to section up each question that we can reasonably answer. Since we’re actually using these boxes on a daily use, we’re not as interested in making them dual boot or how we can make them into portable ESXi hosts when we want to. If we get more equipment in the future, we’ll try those ideas out, but for the most part we just want it to work.

As for general stability, over a 15-20 day period, everything has been stable and running 24/7 and there have been no unexpected crashes, errors, or alarms appearing via the ESXi console.

Uptime (1/18/2012)

The question of uptime, came about from Timo. From the two Mac Mini Servers that we have in use, here’s some screen shots. As you can clearly see, one of the servers has had an uptime of 15 days already while the second one which was purchased a few days later after the theory was proved, has an uptime of 9 days. (This is in reference to January 18, 2012)

Upgraded Memory (1/18/2012)

As for upgrading the memory, to fully make use of the advantages of this setup, 16 gb of most desired. Here’s a screen shot of one of the Mac Mini ESXi hosts with 16 gb of memory and the VM utilization.

Network Card (1/18/2012)

The network card responded as Gigabit and Full Duplex. We have not seen any slow file copies or VM migrations / copies from one Mac Mini to the other.

Any thing else you would like to see?

Post some comments and questions and we’ll try our best to answer them as quickly as possible.

Category : Blog

24 Comments → “The Mac Mini VMware ESXi 5 Server – Part 3 (Follow Up)”

Timo Sugliani

4 months ago

Many thanks,

Hmm, I’m getting very interested for a homelab with such size factor/power

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Matt

4 months ago

Again, this is a great Proof of concept and many thanks for documenting it so well. As for something I’d like to see, do you have any iSCSI targets laying around looking to become storage for some VMs? I’m wondering how the single 1Gb/s ethernet port would/could handle the demands of iSCSI and all other network activity of Host and Guests. Second, is it possible to get the wireless adapter functioning under ESXi 5? If the wireless adapter does function you could devote the 1Gb/s ethernet to the iSCSI and route the other network traffic through the wireless. I can’t imagine the vSphere Client over wireless N speeds would be too terrible…??

Reply
- Paraguin
  
  4 months ago
  
  If you have any suggestions / programs for measuring I/O with a VM and iSCSI target, I’m more than willing to try to find someone with some spare SAN storage either SOHO or Enterprise who will lend me some time. As for the WiFi chipset, that’s something else we’re looking into for the long run though we’re somewhat doubtful since you’d also need a WiFi manager through the CLI. If someone has made an ESXi server with WiFi on and able to connect to an access point, then show us and we’ll work on the driver issue.
  
  Reply
Timo Sugliani

4 months ago

Just for my personal information : Did you also try with the normal mac mini (core i5) as I don’t need much horsepower but only memory (I’ll be having many VMs but with very little load on them, so don’t think I’ll need the extra power or Hard Drive.

Because i5 + 16GB could come up with a rather interesting entry price compared to the mac mini server ‘edition’.

Thanks in advance,

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- Paraguin
  
  4 months ago
  
  I’m pretty confident that it’ll work. I have a Mac Mini i5 with 16 gb of ram running VMware Fusion to act as the VCenter and backup servers. Best of luck.
  
  Reply
eloscurosecreto

2 months ago

This is very interesting. Thank you for the eloquently providing this information to the world. From reading ‘Part 2′ (technical section), it seems that the HDMI and USB interfaces are fully functional. Have you tested the ThunderBolt interface? I’m interested in finding out if ESXi detects this and if it can be used for attaching storage. I’d like to take full advantage of the 1010Gbit/s.

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- Paraguin
  
  2 months ago
  
  No. I believe the only thunderbolt functional storage is the one sold by Apple so you’d have to try that yourself unless someone else already purchased it and figured out if VMware added the drivers for it.
  
  Reply
LakritsTroll

2 months ago

Really appreciate the work in getting this up and running, thanks for a great step-by-step instruction!
Now, if there was a way of making it start automatically after a power outage, I would be totally home free!!!

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eloscurosecreto

2 months ago

Thank you for the prompt response.

What storage options (other than the internal disks) are available (externally) with ESXi 5 on the Mac Mini, if any?

I would like to be able to attach some sort of external device via thunderbolt (which I will test), FW or USB.

My lack of understanding ESXi may come into play within the aforementioned questions, my I apologies in advance.

Reply
- Paraguin
  
  2 months ago
  
  iSCSI would be the best option since it’s cheap and easily available. The I/O on the network card may cause some VMs to load slower as it loads off the network storage, but it would be very viable option. You can choose to build your own iSCSI storage server or buy something that is pre-configured to be iSCSI compatible.
  
  Reply
eloscurosecreto

2 months ago

FireWire (in my environment) would be best for me. Have you had a chance to play around with the vmdirectpath options yet?

Reply
- Paraguin
  
  2 months ago
  
  If you look at the screen shot above in this post, you will see that DirectPath is not supported with this version of ESXi.
  
  Reply
peter

2 months ago

Thanks for this great blog item. I followed it as the main guide for my Mac Mini 2011 esxi 5 installation. And it’s doing fine, I have it on my desk as a test rig.
The tip about installing rollout 2 is correct, but you still have to reinstall the BroadComm driver again – you need the latest patch to run OSX guest and it deinstalls the driver again.
One thing though. After 1 week I’m trying to login using vSphere client and I get an error. Taking over the mini’s screen and restarting the management network fixed the problem.

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Pres

2 months ago

Question,

Can a datastore be mounted through thunderbolt? I am thinking if there was some way to plug in external thunderbolt drives, better yet ssd raided setup and get 10gig connection to 6gbps drives, the performance on a vm would be pretty good through a $1000 server.

If you can’t use thunderbolt, is there a way for a second nic booting off esxi5, to use iscsi?

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nick

1 month ago

has anyone tried adding perhaps a usb nic card for an additional network interface?

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Andrew

1 month ago

How have you found the noise from the Mac Mini server machines?
I am still trying to weigh up using a mac mini, or a Shuttle SZ68R5 with an i7-2600s – or wait for an Opteron 3250/ 3280 based solution.

I am looking for a quiet solution.

Reply
- Paraguin
  
  1 month ago
  
  I have two of them running ontop of a laptop cooler and leave it in a storage area with decent air flow. Overall, they are quiet and unless I really ramp up some VMs, the overall noise is minimal. I have about 8+ VMs running at most times.
  
  Reply
Myatix

1 month ago

Great blog…
Have you tried installing ESXi on an SD card instead of the Mac Mini harddrive? I was thinking about running ESXi from an SD card in the Mac Mini and then using a NAS with iSCSI for my VM Datastore. I would be really interested in hearing if anyone has tried this? The idea is I would like the Mac Mini to boot from it’s own hard disk into Lion when the SD card isn’t mounted???

Is this possible? How do I go about making a bootable ESXi SD card?

Thanks for any tips…

Reply
blahblahguy

4 weeks ago

I was unable to install directly to the SD card, the esxi installation did not recognize it/show it as an option… But…

I have a micro SD card and have SD and USB adapters for it, so I installed esxi to the USB (micro SD card in usb adapter), then after installation I moved the micro SD card to the SD adapter. I can select the SD slot from the mac efi boot selection screen, ESXi boots fine, but when I make changes to the network, or install VMs, the network changes and vm inventory is lost at reboot.

I’m not sure if ESXi is mounting the SD card in read-only mode, or if ESXi has an absolute path to the location where it would store network/vm configuration information and is trying to access something on the now non-existant USB drive. In order to permanently change the IP, I had to move the micro SD card back to the USB adapter, boot up, make the change, shut down, then when I move the micro SD back to the SD adapter and boot up, the network change is in place.

I’m not a vmware professional so I don’t know exactly how ESXi handles it’s configuration storage and haven’t had much time to try to get it working, but wanted to respond and let you know the experience with SD installation.

I’m not sure where to go from here to get it fully configurable on the SD slot. If anyone has any command tips of where to go from here I can try them and report back, maybe we can get it to work. I don’t have much time to do research on it unfortunately as vmware isn’t my main gig.

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david

3 weeks ago

love the idea, not liking the cost.

i have found that an HP DC5800 makes a great option. low power, < 35W at idle, you can get quad core, but only up to 16GB RAM. add PCI-E lowprofile multi-port NICs.

you can find them on ebay for about $300 with the quad core CPU. runs ESX 4.1 for certain, and probably 5.0

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chau nguyen

3 weeks ago

I’ve successfully followed your guide to install esxi 5 on mac mini.
The problem i have now is I can’t install solaris 10 on it.
There always an error 36 when decompressing at the beginning of installation.
I even make sure it have more than enough RAM.

Reply
Emmanuel

3 weeks ago

I just tested ESX 5.0 Update 1 on my Mac Mini Server, unfortunatly ESXi does not recognize my Thunderbolt attached Storage (Promize).
Do you know if a driver is released for Thunderbolt Mac Mini ?

Reply
- vSean
  
  1 week ago
  
  Since the interesting half of the thunderbolt data stream is really a serial PCIe bridge, you’d need to find a driver vib for the storage controller promise is using. A bit of googling tells me its probably a PM8011, and the closest matching PCIe card would be the Promise Supertrack line. Those are HCL, but are all async drivers (not included). The one you want is probably “stex version 4.07.0000.75″ but with the MyVMware go live the driver downloads are still a jumbled mess of broken links. They are there, if you did around the site long enough it will turn up. I post in the hopes you can get it to work. Good luck.
  
  Reply
vSean

1 week ago

Just an FYI, there is a newer tg3 driver available. Search for tg3-3.123b.v50.1-682322.zip release notes say 4/3/12 even though the vmware site has last years date on the download.

Release notes include some potential PSOD related fixes under vmware.

I was hoping it would enable the SD card reader bits of the broadcom chip, but no luck. Seems stable on the ethernet side though.

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