The Happy Mac icon was the normal bootup screen of the Macintosh, it was also used on floppy disks of System softwares. The Mac OS logo and rebranding marks it's debut on version 7.5.1. Released on March 23, 1995. This logo was used for the Mac OS X v10.0, code-named 'Cheetah', and v10.1, code-named 'Puma'. These versions were preceded by the Mac OS X Public Beta, code-named 'Kodiak'. This standalone visualizer software for PC and Mac gives users access to many handy features, like video recording, picture-in-picture and annotation, as well as a number of unique, advanced features, like automatic image correction, side-by-side comparison, a personalized media library and one-click upload to social media & file sharing sites. Currently there is no VS code support for Mac OS. You will need to use Window 10 Anniversary update or later. You can open a feature request for the Azure Sphere team to enable Mac OS support here.
A valuable addition to any home lab setup is a hypervisor environment where you can spin up virtual hosts, servers, and applications to suit your needs. First, you need to decide if you want to use dedicated hardware or run virtual machines (VMs) on top of your existing operating system. If you are are only planning on a couple virtual machines (VMs) then a type-2 hypervisor that runs on top of an operating system such as VMware's workstation or Oracle's virtual box will be right up your alley. If you plan on spinning up a lot of VMs, running dedicated servers, or just want to gain more experience with technologies used in an enterprise environment than a type-1 hypervisor is what you want. I went with a type-1 hypervisor namely VMware's vSphere / ESXi. I chose vSphere since it was free and I'm the most familiar with VMare's products.
Since I chose to run on a dedicated box I now had to choose what hardware I was actually going to use. *Please make sure you check any hardware against the compatibility list for whatever solution you use. There are numerous different ways you can go from low end Intel i3 boxes to high end servers with 48+ cores. It helped me during this scoping phase to ask the following questions.
Mac OS X specific issues Alt key doesn't work If you find yourself unable to use Inkscape functions that require the alt key (i.e. Option key) such as Alt+D to create a clone or Alt+Click to select under, you will need to turn off the 'Emulate three button mouse' under the Input Preferences for X11.
- What type of VMs will I be creating?
- How many VMs will I be creating?
- How many resources will said VMs utilize?
- Do I want to do any clustering?
I wanted to be able to spin up hosts, servers, and really anything that I wanted to. This ended up being a major factor in my hardware decision as I wanted to virtualize macOS. Virtualizing macOS is only legitimately allowed on Apple hardware so that limited me greatly on what hardware I could use. I wanted to be able to create a lot of resource intensive VMs as well which further limited my choices. I wasn't interested in clustering and preferred to have some ability to upgrade my hardware so I settled on a 2010 Mac Pro with dual hexa-core 3.06Ghz Xeon processors, 64GB of RAM, 512GB SSD, and a 4TB drive. *
Given that the older Mac Pro's can actually be upgraded the first thing I did upon receiving it was add additional hard drives and two additional network interface cards (NICs). I added one 4TB and one 2TB drive giving me a total of 10TB of spinning disk, 512GB of SSD capacity, and I still have the ability to add more drives in the unused 5.25' bay.
Once I had all of the hardware installed I went ahead and burned a copy of vSphere 6 to a DVD, popped it into the optical drive on the Mac pro, restarted it and followed the prompts to install ESXi. I ended up installing ESXi on the SSD versus a separate flash drive which I believe goes against best practices but hasn't been a issue for me so far. Installation was pretty painless and once it was complete I got a screen similar to the one below.
I accessed the URL from my desktop and was greeted with the page below.
Then I accessed the web interface by clicking on the link for 'Open the VMware Host Client'.
![Plano Plano](https://miro.medium.com/max/3696/0*x7Nml8st28mBNga-.jpg)
This screen shot was taken a little later so you can see I've already created some VMs. In addition to the web GUI you can control the server with the Windows Fat client or in my case I use VMWare Fusion to control certain functions, act as the remote console, or to upload VMs to the ESXi host. I've found Fusion to be overall very helpful but I do wish it had more functionality / control over the ESXI host. Overall, I've been very happy with my decision to use a Mac Pro for my ESXi host.
Issues / Lessons Learned
- Purple screen of death. This was not something I was familiar with and I ran into a few of these the first couple of days I had the Mac Pro up and running. It can be hard to decipher these screens. In this case it was a Machine Check Exception (MCE) that has it's own separate page to assist in figuring out what it means. It appears to be an issue with one of the CPUs but this issue ended up disappearing which could have been due to putting the host on an UPS, providing additional cooling, or through dumb luck.
- VMNIC Issues. I installed an Intel Dual NIC roughly the same time I installed the additional hard drives. I wanted additional NICs so that I could play around with link aggregation / NIC teaming. However, I ran into an issue where one of the two built in NICs decided to show up in ESXi as a storage adapter. Just re-scanning the device had no impact so I enabled SSH and took a look at esx.conf. The devices showed up as follows:
/device/00000:010:00.0/vmkname = 'vmnic0'
/device/00000:000:31.2/vmkname = 'vmhba0'
![Sphere factor mac os x Sphere factor mac os x](https://pubs.rsc.org/image/article/2020/sm/d0sm01327g/d0sm01327g-f3_hi-res.gif)
/device/00000:006:00.0/vmkname = 'vmnic1'
/device/00000:006:00.1/vmkname = 'vmnic2'
So three NICs and a virtual machine host bus adapter? I ended up renaming it within the config to match the rest of the NICs, gave it a reboot, and then success!
Well, until the next reboot and now it is back to an hba. If anyone has a persistent answer to this particular issue I'd be most appreciative.
- When uploading an OSX or macOS VM to the ESXi host with Fusion you must go to that VM once it is uploaded and change the guest OS type to Mac OS otherwise it will never work.
- When installing Kali linux in ESXi you may run into a weird problem that I did where upon the initial boot after an install you get nothing but a black screen. What I did was enter my creds blindly and everything starts working once it logs you in. Make sure you update after that and you won't have the problem again.