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MAC MINI SERVER SETUP GUIDE FOR MAC OS
MAC MINI SERVER SETUP GUIDE MAC OS
MAC MINI SERVER SETUP GUIDE INSTALL

2-4 uninterrupted hours, 4 if you’re upgrading your hardware.

1x Mac Mini Logic Board Tool (you can sub in spudgers if you like to live dangerously).

500GB SSDs to replace the included 2x 1TB 5400RPM HDs.

Current generation Mac Mini (I used the default server config as the base).

To replicate the setup I created, you’ll first need to gather the following:

MAC MINI SERVER SETUP GUIDE MAC OS

Need to upgrade to a the latest point revision of Mac OS X? Take a snapshot of your VM, run the update, and if things break no big deal-just roll back to the last snapshot.Ĭonvinced you yet? If so, read on to find out exactly how you can do it yourself. If one service goes down you can reboot that VM and not affect the rest. Need Netboot, Profile Manager, and Caching Server? You can block services off in their own instance of OS X in VSphere.

With a Sonnet RackMac enclosure you get two Minis per 1U in a server rack.

Mac Minis are easy to add to server racks.

Compare that to the price of the older Mac Pros and the XServes of yore, and they’re a steal. The Server model costs $999 without any upgrades.

Mac Minis are, relatively speaking, cheap.

The new Mac Pro isn’t designed to run as a headless server-it’s targeted at high end graphics and video editing. XServes, and the older sliver tower Mac Pros aren’t being produced, and haven’t been in several years.

Mac Minis are the only “server” Macs available.

MAC MINI SERVER SETUP GUIDE INSTALL

So, you might be wondering, why on earth would someone strip the OS off of a Mac Mini and install ESXI on it. General benefits of using Mac Minis, especially with ESXI

MAC MINI SERVER SETUP GUIDE FOR MAC OS

In a follow-up post I’ll cover some of the imaging caveats for Mac OS VMs. Note: If you’re here for assistance on getting ESXI up and running on your own Mini, please skip to step 7 of "Loading ESXI vSphere" for directions on getting past the Pink Screen of Death. They were the department that initially approached me about getting multiple Mac OS environments set up, and have benefited the most from the transition to ESXI vSphere hosted VMs. The most notable of the engineering groups who need long-running Mac environments is our Mobile team, which needs them to compile our iOS apps. Also, as our entire office runs on Mac laptops we also need to have environments that can run for extended or indefinite time periods. New Relic’s Portland office is our Intergalactic Engineering HQ, and as such the engineers need to have a variety of different OS virtual machines. Who needs Mac VMs anyways? Or, why the heck did I do this? Turning current-gen Mac Minis into ESXI vSphere hosts isn’t the strangest thing you’re ever going to do, but be warned: the route I took does void the AppleCare warranty included with the computer. Since it’s a bit tricky, and the latest and most complete documentation I found was from 2012, I decided to document the process. When my users asked for new Mac OS VMs to test Xcode for teams, I jumped at the chance to build ESXI hosts. Being a lifelong Mac Geek I’ve spent a fair amount of time fiddling in the guts of Macs and doing all sorts of strange Mac Wizardry.

As a Mac Sysadmin you learn early on that sometimes you have to do strange and terrible things to the machines you look after at the behest of your users.