Leopard, Snow Leopard, and Lion on ESXi

[balthisar]

I'm trying to migrate my VM collection from VMware Fusion on my Mac to ESXi (7 or 8, currently using 7) running on an Intel 13th gen i3 server. ESXi is unlocked, and it's been pretty flawless installing everything from Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion all the way to Sonoma. I can't seem to get any of the 10.4, 10.5, 10.6, or 10.7 stuff to boot from their ISO images, though, although they work perfectly with VMware Fusion. I'm using the Server version of all of these, and I'll deal with efi32.rom and efi64.rom as a next step for the client versions.

 

Basically I've set up the default Mac OS X 10.6 VM: hard drive and CD both on SATA. They all suffer the same kernel panic very shortly into the boot process. I guess I can't copy and paste from the VMware remote console, so I've attached a screenshot.

 

I've searched the forum, but most of the discussion is many, many years old and several versions of ESxi ago.

 

Any other old OS archivists like me who've faced this issue and gotten things working on modern ESxi?

 

Thanks!

[balthisar]

Well, I'm making a bit of progress. Adding

 

ich7m.present = "TRUE"

…to the default VM allows 10.4 Tiger Server and 10.5 Leopard sever to boot from their installers and install.

 

This isn't enough for Snow Leopard or Lion, so if anyone has been down this road and can share, it'd be much appreciated!

 

[STLVNUB]

May Be CPU POWER Management Issue, No Idea How To Fix It Though

BACK IN THE DAY, USED TO HAVE TO PASS TO CHAMELEON

THE CPUS=1 ARGUMENT

 

Edited February 21 by STLVNUB

[joevt]

Probably not helpful, but to boot 10.4.11 on a MacPro3,1 with Nvidia GTX 680, I had to remove these two extensions:

- AppleAHCIPort.kext (to disable a PCIe card installed that had an AHCI controller).
- NVDAResman.kext (because the Nvidia drivers don't know about Kepler).

For 10.5.8, I only had to remove the latter. 10.6.8 and later didn't have any problems.