Weblog – Thomas S. Iversen

I wanted to run OS-X at home, preferrably on my AMD Fusion based ESXi 5.0.0, 469512 host. If you search the net for that combination you will find a lot of posts about people having issues and not many about people having a great success. Digging into this it turned out to be relatively simple to do.

1. Obtain OS-X Snow leopard ISO image
2. Obtain Donks OS-X unlocker for vmware. I used unlock-all-v110.zip
3. Backup you ESXi host and VMs before doing anything! I am not liable in any way for any issues you encounter! It worked for me. Your millage may vary and that is actually your problem
4. Patch ESXi with Donks unlocker by unzipping the zip file on the ESXi host and running esxi/install.sh. Make sure to read the readme file beforehand and make sure that all the prereqs are in place before you start!
5. Reboot your ESXi host and hope for the best.
6. After a successful reboot of ESXi with Donks patches, create a new OS-X based VM. 64-bit, 4GB memory, 1 processor (and one processor only, otherwise you will get panics during installation), LSI Logic Parallel SCSI, E1000 network
7. Do NOT power up the VM.
8. Enter the ESXi cli.
9. Browse to the location of the VM on the ESXi datastore
10. type vi *.vmx <enter>
11. remove all references to CPUID
12. insert the following CPUID information (this will make ESXi present the VM as a core2duo based machine to the guest allowing OS-X to boot on the hardware)

    hostCPUID.0 = "0000000668747541444d416369746e65"

    hostCPUID.1 = "00500f100002080000802209178bfbff"

    hostCPUID.80000001 = "00500f1000001242000035ff2fd3fbff"

    guestCPUID.0 = "00000006756e65476c65746e49656e69"

    guestCPUID.1 = "000006f10000080080802209078bfbff"

    guestCPUID.80000001 = "00500f1000001242000003e92bd3fbff"

    userCPUID.0 = "0000000668747541444d416369746e65"

    userCPUID.1 = "00500f100002080080802209078bfbff"

    userCPUID.80000001 = "00500f1000001242000003e92bd3fbff"

    cpuid.0.ebx="0111:0101:0110:1110:0110:0101:0100:0111"

    cpuid.0.edx="0100:1001:0110:0101:0110:1110:0110:1001"

    cpuid.0.ecx="0110:1100:0110:0101:0111:0100:0110:1110"

    cpuid.1.eax="0000:0000:0000:0000:0000:0110:1111:0001"

13. Save the vmx file
14. Attach the Snow Leopard ISO to the VM and boot it.
15. Perform a normal OS-X installation.

Nothing much actually. The final solution

And seen from vnc

 

 

Quite simple …. as promised