It was a success in the fact that the ESXi bootloader (boot圆4.efi) was actually loading, but it would consistently fail at downloading the 11th file with a Fatal 33 (Inconsistent Error). My first attempt of booting ESXi onto my Mac Mini used the traditional PXE/TFTP combo and it was partially successful. This was the first challenge in just getting a basic response from a Mac system, which the solution indeed provided. The biggest breakthrough for me in that article which also built upon the work from another individual here (sadly the link recently died) was the fact that they were able to get BSDP working with a standard ISC DHCP server. To my surprise, I came across the following article where the author claimed they were successful in Netbooting a Mac system using Linux. It was only earlier this week in preparing for a customer call next week that I decided to re-open an email thread that I had with our Engineering folks which dates back almost 3 years ago. Although nothing had changed from the VMware side, this then lead me to check whether something had changed in the IT community via a Google search.

Though, I do think it is pretty interesting and worth getting the full context 🙂 If not and you just want the goods, jump down a bit further. Tl dr - If you are interested in the background to the eventual solution, continue reading.

With no real viable solution over the years, it was believed that a Netboot installation of ESXi onto Mac Hardware just may not be possible. Even if you had set this up, a Netboot installation was wildly different from a traditional PXE installation and it would be pretty difficult to near impossible to get it working with an ESXi image. It was expected that if you were going to Netboot (equivalent of PXE/Kickstart in the Apple world) a server that you would be running a Mac OS X system. In addition, there are very few DHCP servers that even support BSDP (at least this may have been true 4 years ago when I had initially inquired about this topic). Unlike traditional scripted network installations which commonly uses Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE), Apple Mac Hardware actually uses its own developed Boot Service Discover Protocol (BSDP) which ESXi and other OSses do not support. The ability to perform an ESXi Scripted Installation over the network has been a basic capability for non-Apple hardware customers since the initial release of classic ESX. However, for customers who run ESXi on Apple Mac Hardware (first introduced in vSphere 5.0), being able to remotely boot and install ESXi over the network has not been possible and customers could only dream of this capability which many of us have probably taken for granted.

Apple netboot server for mac