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I am researching into the Mac Pro as my next PC (purpose is software dev with virtual test labs etc).

I am thinking of running ESX on such a box. Is it possible to scrap the OS and deploy just the hypervisor? A colleague in my company says he runs VMWare Fusion on a Mac (not sure if it is the Pro), and then ESX within that, which holds the VMs he can RDP to. How well would this approach work? The immediate thing is that this approach has so many layers so ESX is talking to VMWare Fusion and not the hardware layer directly - am I correct? What would the ideal approach be?

Thanks

John Gardeniers
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GurdeepS
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4 Answers4

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You are not going to want to run ESX from within Fusion. ESX is an X86 based hypervisor that install directly on a server (its like a lightweight OS that can run VMs) and is intended (and priced) for enterprise use.

Fusion is a hypervisor that runs from within your OSX install as a process and allows you to install virtual machines 'on top' of OSX.

In short, you don't need to look at ESX, Fusion alone would be sufficient. The other route that I have seen is Parallels desktop, which seems quite popular.

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You definitely wouldn't want to run Fusion -> ESX -> VMs. That's a hypervisor inside a hypervisor, which is pointless. As Chris above stated, just using VMware Fusion is sufficient if that is what you want & just create VMs from within Fusion. The only downside to this is you need a fully functional OS to run VMware Fusion, so that adds a lot of overhead and you're losing hardware resources to that.

If you are looking for a true hypervisor solution, look in to Parallels Server. With this product, the hypervisor itself is the OS and all you need to get your VMs up and running.

If you're stuck on the VMware boat, you can get ESX(i) working on a Mac Pro. Various people have been successful doing this, but it seems to depend on which version Mac Pro you have.

churnd
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This is my story to run a bare metal hypervisor (Hyper-V) on a Mac mini. I need to run Hyper-V on my two Mac minis to test some replication stuff for a customer. First installation of Hyper-V on my older mini runs like a charm and I could install VM as desired. But on the second mini I run into the problem that the hypervisor do not run and I could not install or run a VM. So here's the trick. As it is not possible to enter any BIOS settings because the Mac do not have them, it must be done from the software above. So I installed OSX (Mojave) on my Mac and the install VMWare Fusion (11). I don't think that the version of OSC of VMWare is it, only to install it is the trick. This seems to have the hypervisor functionality enabled. After installing VMWare Fusion and run it without any VM on it I shut down the Mac mini, delete OSX and install Windows Hyper-V 2012R2 bare metal. Now I could install and run VMs on my Mac mini bare metal Hyper-V.

Hope this helps

Dr. Goldman
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Why do you need a type-1 (bare metal) hypervisor?

I think the best approach is running VirtualBox on Mac OS X. You can configure VirtualBox to run VMs in the background, independently of your login to Mac OS X and start them automatically at system boot. You can also write a script that freezes such background VMs before a Mac reboot.

That's the configuration I use and it works well. I run a Linux and Win2008 server in the background and several VMs as applications in Mac OS.

VirtualBox is free and updated often. Plus you can transfer your VMs from the Mac host to Windows, Linux and Solaris hosts since VirtualBox runs on all four platforms.

Andrew J. Brehm
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