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Bare metal hypervisor on Mac Mini


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I am looking at using Mac Mini servers to host a few virtual machines each. I know that Parallels has an expensive bare metal hypervisor that is supposed to run on Mac Mini hardware, but I was wondering if anybody has had success getting any of the other bare metal hypervisors to run on Mac Mini? eg. ESXi, XenServer, KVM etc.

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I am looking at using Mac Mini servers to host a few virtual machines each. I know that Parallels has an expensive bare metal hypervisor that is supposed to run on Mac Mini hardware, but I was wondering if anybody has had success getting any of the other bare metal hypervisors to run on Mac Mini? eg. ESXi, XenServer, KVM etc.

 

XenServer 5.5 Update 2 runs quite well on pre-2008 mac minis.

XenServer 5.6 installs fine, but network is broken.

 

However, running XenServer on a machine with 2 GB RAM is not funny at all :)

 

Regards

Sven

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I am looking at using Mac Mini servers to host a few virtual machines each. I know that Parallels has an expensive bare metal hypervisor that is supposed to run on Mac Mini hardware, but I was wondering if anybody has had success getting any of the other bare metal hypervisors to run on Mac Mini? eg. ESXi, XenServer, KVM etc.

 

Thanks for this post, I didn't even know that they made baremetal hypervisor! I've been waiting for so long!!!

 

I don't think ESXi is possible to install on Mac hardware, at least not at this moment. Be sure that "something" is cooking in VMware labs, as a response to Parallels.

 

On the second though... you can install Ubuntu or any other supported linux and install VMware Server on it. Of course, it won't run as fast as bare metal... but still, it will work just fine for a few VM's.

 

Let me know your thoughts!

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Thanks for this post, I didn't even know that they made baremetal hypervisor! I've been waiting for so long!!!

 

I don't think ESXi is possible to install on Mac hardware, at least not at this moment. Be sure that "something" is cooking in VMware labs, as a response to Parallels.

 

On the second though... you can install Ubuntu or any other supported linux and install VMware Server on it. Of course, it won't run as fast as bare metal... but still, it will work just fine for a few VM's.

 

Let me know your thoughts!

 

I haven't tried it as no spare kit, but ESXi 4.1 definitely seems to have some smarts about Apple hardware. It has code to look for the SMC which is needed for Mac OS X virtualization. (To get the keys for decrypting binaries). Maybe someone could give it a shot!

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