MAC OS on VMware ESXi

 Can one run a MAC OS as a VM on a VMware host?  Well technically yes.  Legally, No.  In my case we needed to just test how Saffari acts with some web pages.  

Disclaimer: my understanding is that Apple VMs are only legal on Apple Hardware.  The only hardware that supports ESX is the "TrashCan".  Otherwise Vmware Fusion is a free download. 

High Level Steps:

-on a Mac using the App Store, download the bits to the OS in question

-on that Mac, convert those bits to a DMG file

-on that Mac, convert the DMG to an ISO

-upload the ISO to VMware server

-create a VM, mount the ISO and install, however the following changes need to be made to the ".vmx" file.

smc.present = "TRUE"

smc.version = "0"

hw.model = "Macmini8,1"

board-id = "Mac-7BA5B2D9E42DDD94"

serialNumber = "C02ZK0XXXXXX"

efi.nvram.var.ROM = "A1B2C3D4E5F6"

efi.nvram.var.MLB = "C02712300Q6NNNJA8"

Once installed, install VMware tools.  I had a really hard time finding them, the file is called "Darwin.ISO"

New life to really old Macs??

 Apple is really strict as to what OS can be loaded on their hardware.  In this case I have a Mac Mini 2014, which is an i5-4278u.  The newest OFFICIALLY supported OS it will run is Monterey.  However with the help of "OpenCore Legacy Patcher" I was able to put Sequoia on it. 

The machine is slow, but that is to be expected on 11 year old hardware, including a spinning hard disk.  I should put in an SSD but I didn't want to take an hour to do that swap.  No thanks to Apple Engineers making things overly complicated.