VMware shreds planned support for 'cheese grater' Mac Pro VMware has announced something a little odd: it won't ever support ESXi running on Apple's 2019 Mac Pro. "While VMware does not comment on future hardware enablement for our ESXi platform, we felt an update was warranted for our customers who have been inquiring about support for the Apple 2019 Mac Pro 7,1," states a post on …
"...twin Xeon Platinum processors, 3TB of RAM, and three Nvidia Quatro RTX6000 GPUs." sounds just about powerful enough to let me play Pong! *Cough* Ok, ok, seriously, that sounds like a rather nice rig to have at one's disposal. I imagine it would take quite a lot to make it even notice the work you threw at it, much less have enough to do to make it spin up a CPU fan to deal with potential overheating. I wouldn't try to install Win11 on it though, MS would probably tell me it was already obsolete & that I needed a hardware upgrade to something like a TPM 666 chip...
"We could go on, but you get the idea – this is a serious workstation with enough power to handle its stated purpose of helping video production types to breeze through their days. It also has enough muscle to handle the job of hosting macOS virtual machines. That may not be the most in-demand workload in the world, but virtual workstations are increasingly in demand as it's hard to build efficient media production pipelines that include remote workers."
It's quite difficult to do media production on a system without graphics acceleration, which macOS doesn't support when running on ESXi.
Which is the main reason why those that rely on macOS who require a remote system just employ a stack of cheap Mac minis, because not only does it give them accelerated graphics but it's also much cheaper than buying an expensive Mac Pro (which has zero redundancy, not even dual PSUs, and therefore presents a single point of failure) plus expensive ESXi licenses.
From the article: "One more thing: the 2019 Mac Pro drew criticism for reaching prices well in excess of $50,000 when equipped with maximal CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage options. Then as now, RAM and GPUs added most to the machine's cost, and do so on other manufacturers' workstations too. The Register just whipped up a config for a Dell Precision 7920 Tower Workstation with a price tag that topped $127,000, thanks to the inclusion of twin Xeon Platinum processors, 3TB of RAM, and three Nvidia Quatro RTX6000 GPUs."
What the author misses here (aside from the fact that the Mac Pro is a single CPU system so comparing it with a dual processor machine is kind of silly, the Dell Precision T5820 is what would be the equivalent to the Mac Pro) is that no-one pays list price for a Dell, HP, Lenovo or Fujitsu workstation while the discounts even for large buyers (if there were any) of Mac Pros are negligible at best (usually within single digit percentages, if any).
For a big brand workstation, discounts of 20-30% are common even for lower order numbers, and then there are manufacturer refurbished systems like HP RENEW which look like new, smell like new and come with the same warranty (usually 3yrs onsite) and which cost even less. Compared to Apple Refurbished where Apple graciously shaves off $250 from a $7k Mac Pro config, that's a huge difference.
And even a $50k Mac Pro still only comes with a single year of warranty unless you pay extra for the overpriced AppleCare option, and in any case gives you the privilege to schlepp your heavy computer to the next Apple Store whenever it has a problem because Apple doesn't do "onsite" support, where it will be examined by a Genius who very likely has never seen that model before.
Back when we were buying Apple desktops (didn't have any MacPros since the original intel tanks), it wasn't too difficult to get some decent (for Apple) discounts from the Apple sales dweebs.
And I was a very small fry.
I'd imagine any organization that is the type buying these machines would be also discussing said sales with an Apple sales team, and not depending on web or reseller pricing (which is pretty bad).
They'd probably have an MSP that would take care fo service as well.
Some ratty mac Minis dotted around the office and building the occasional bit of software for the consumer app store *is* the Apple way. The sooner people understand that, the sooner that they can stop screwing up their infrastructure.
It is not a professional platform and should not be virtualized or anywhere near a server room.
It would indeed be nice and it was confusing at first but now the reason is obvious. With the planned transition to Apple Silicon they probably didn't want to validate another CPU architecture and deal with the differences instruction sets and other CPU-specific features, optimizations, bug workarounds, etc. for two or three years of products.
Honestly, Mac OS is missing a lot of server features, the hardware is ridiculously overpriced and updates often break things. You'd be crazy to run Mac OS severs in 2020. Even if you only have access to Apple hardware just install Linux or BSD. Apple has been very clear for years since they discontinued the Xserve. They do not care about servers.
2010: Xserve killed. MacMini suggested as replacements.
2014: New MacMini unsuitable for server use (fewer cores, no user replaceable parts inside).
2018: Apple whispers farewell to macOS Server.
2021: VMware realises Apple couldn't give a toss about Macs as servers.
ESXi is a bare metal hypervisor, intended for servers. While I suppose you can run it on a workstation/desktop if it meets the hardware requirements, why in the world would you do that versus running an OS and VMware workstation on top of that OS?
Did they see an untapped market of people who would buy a Mac Pro wanting use it as a generic server?
Can't tell but I think you missed the obvious use case of being able to legally run lots of OS X VMs on top of the system since it is really beefy in hardware vs the other options. Though have read reports OS X runs like crap in a VM(crap as in user interface very slow etc), am not sure if that is because they were using unsupported hardware or if the OS just doesn't play well without say mapping GPUs to the VMs (something ESXi can do but as far as I know the desktop/workstation VMware products cannot - personally have never had a need to map a GPU to a VM, though understand that VDI is the main purpose for that).
What I'm curious of(not that I have a need for it) is does ESXi work at all? Is this them just saying they won't support it, or were they actually getting drivers together etc for it to work in the first place. Since there seems to be lots of folks out there running unsupported ESXI configurations without formal support and are happy. Hell even the free ESXi doesn't include support.
Given it is a Xeon system I would be kind of surprised it wouldn't be possible to build a configuration that didn't work with ESXi being that you can add in (I assume) another NIC or something in case on board is not supported since it has a bunch of PCIe slots.
Why would they want to run a lot of Mac VMs on the same hardware? You suggesting someone running a lot of "Macs" using cheap PCs as the VDI client?
I suppose that's theoretically possible, but there are can't be many companies using Macs that don't have a reason to use actual Macs - i.e. that want the macOS GUI but don't care about performance. That's the sort of thing you do when you have lots of employees who use their PCs only for email, office, file sharing and accessing the corporate intraweb. If that's all they do, is there a meaningful difference between a Mac and PC?
I work in academia which is very much a mixed Mac/PC environment.
The common use case for a Mac VM is support/development. New bit of software comes out, or even just an updated version, you want to install it on a test machine first. With a PC it’s easy enough to have VMs running the standard image for testing, you can roll back and all the other good stuff.
But Apple insists on Mac hardware to run their OS, even in a VM. So do you have to give all your support people Macs so they can test things as well as a PC? Having a nice big host let’s you consolidate into one box which is one of the advantages of virtualisation.
Where does Apple "insist you run their OS"? You can run whatever you want inside a VM on a Mac. But if you are trying to run a "standard image" for testing you're running macOS anyway. On x86 Macs you might run a Windows VM, but those are going away.
A little Mac Mini sitting in a corner can run a VM over VNC and anyone can use it remotely. If you have enough people doing this you might need more than one, but Mac Minis + Parallels are a lot cheaper than a Mac Pro + ESXi license unless you are talking dozens of simultaneous users.
The older Mac Pro units made great ESXi hosts. I know people who had multiple Pro boxes in their homelab. Same with the older Mac Minis. You could even get it running on the trashcan (6.1) variant at a pinch.
As for VMware support, this doesn't necessarily mean that the latest Mac Pro won't work - just that you're on your own getting it there.
Two of the boxes in my homelab are examples of this - vSphere 7.0 won't install as the CPUs aren't supported (dropped from the compatibility list even though they're capable of running the hypervisor). Neither of them are supported officially but with a bit of mucking about you can get it running with all hardware recognised.
"The older Mac Pro units made great ESXi hosts. I know people who had multiple Pro boxes in their homelab. Same with the older Mac Minis. You could even get it running on the trashcan (6.1) variant at a pinch."
That may be true for homelabs where obsolete hardware is looking to retain some excuse to prevent it being recycled and where reliability counts for nothing. And even then it's often questionable if it makes sense to keep them for ESXi instead of selling it on. Even more so when considering how limited Apple hardware is to other alternatives, in addition from not being the most reliable either.
For example, older versions of the classic Mac Pro (Cheesegrater) come with CPUs that lack even basic vt-d support (i.e. IOMMU), and while the later versions (MP4,x/MP5,x) have vt-d support their (XEON 5500/5600) processors they also are vulnerable to a range of security exploits for which intel didn't provide any microcode updates. All MPs also lack the remote management capabilities that any contemporary PC workstation came with. Their design (where the SATA ports are part of the mainboard) also doesn't allow the use of standard RAID controllers, they aren't exactly maintenance friendly (aside from the CPU tray), and have a weak point in that their PRAM is prone to failure after too many reboots (so you should always keep a copy of your NVRAM content).
The successor Mac Pro (MP6,1, Trashcan) has a long and solid history of being an unreliable POS, with the proprietary and long obsolete GPUs dying because of the inability of it's poor thermal design to remove all they heat they generate. The Trashcan is one of the most unreliable Macs ever made (probably second only to the Mac Cube), and on top of that has very poor expandability (limited memory, no internal PCIe slots or SATA, just a single M.2 MiniPCIe 2.0 x4 slot for a PCIe SSD which can be used for some NVMe SSDs and which is limited to 2GB/s plus four very temperamental ports for the obsolete Thunderbolt 2 standard). Considering it's become some kind of collector's item which sells for insane prices, it makes zero sense to use one as ESXi host when it could be sold for a lot of money (which even basic machines in poot condition do), which would easily buy one a much better/faster better system which is much more suited for running ESXi.
Mac minis, especially older ones, are also prone to overheating (especially the Core i7 variants) and all have very limited expandability, so they, too, aren't exactly well suited for being used as a VM host. If that's what you have then it makes more sense to install a newer macOS version using OPLC and sell them on ebay, and again use the proceeds to buy a non-Apple system which is better suited for ESXi instead.
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