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kscottmyers
Contributor
Contributor

OS X Yosemite, vSphere 6 and latest VMware Tools?

I haven't been able to get an answer on this - has anyone been able to get Yosemite running (yes on Mac hardware), with the VMware Tools running properly? Yosemite seems to run fine except for the resolution being fixed at 1024 x 768 and there are some other graphic glitches.

Just checking for some success on this? Seems Yosemite has been out now for some time now for VMWare to fix the issues.

Thanks - Scott

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paolomic
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi Scott

No issues here.  I am running Mac Pro 6,1 with ESXi 6.0 GA release and have 10.7, 10.8, 10.9 and 10.10 all virtualized

A few things:

I went in and set the video ram from Auto to manual and gave each VM 128MB Video Ram (This Mac Pro has 6GB worth of video cards so why the hell not). Also you will notice you can't run past 1024x768 with the measly 4MB it assigns by default.  Power off your VM, add more video ram, power it back up and see how it goes.

Also, I don't use the VMware console much. I enabled screen sharing on the VM and VNC in and am able to run the thing at full res on my 27" Thunderbolt display via my Macbook Air

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kscottmyers
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks paolomic. Its been like pulling teeth trying to get anyone to respond to this.

I believe the issue only affects the Mac mini. I don't have a Mac Pro to test. This started with ESXi 6. I have two 2011 Minis and have been happy running ESXi up until Yosemite and version 6. I tried the 128MB video setting with the same results - I only get 1024 x 768 resolution. Not to mention its dead slow. I believe there's more to this issue. Still testing and very little online about it.

Thanks.

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paolomic
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hey Scott,

I actually have a couple 2011 Mini (Model A1347) here at the office.  The one i tried initially only had 4GB of memory and ESXi complained that it needed 4096 vs the 3871 it was picking up.

I suspect the choppiness on your end is due to these Mini's not having a lot of video ram to start with and assigning 128 would tax the box and VM.  I have a bit of free time this week, as i've been asked to get more OS-X machines virtualized for our developers to test our app on.

I'll get one mini up and running with enough RAM and see if I can replicate this issue as well and perhaps see if i can try and figure out where the issue is coming from. 

I suppose us Mac people need to stick together Smiley Happy  There's not too many of us running ESXi on them.  I'll try and post back in the next few days if i find anything out

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kscottmyers
Contributor
Contributor

Thats awesome. Thanks for the help.

I'm running two minis both with 16GBs of memory and SSDs for storage. Normally they run fine. This seems to be an issue with Yosemite and ESXi 6. I also run iSCSI from a Sinology and have tested network speeds that seem to indicated something is definitely wrong with the minis. A PC running ESXi 6 with a Win 7 machine runs great.

This all started with version 6 for me. Thanks again.

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laurentd
Contributor
Contributor

Hi paolomic,

Could you confirm that you can access to resolution above 1024x768 using the VMware console ?

I have also a MacPro 6,1 and using your settings, cannot have a resolution higher than 1024x768 with VMware console.

Regards

Laurent

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paolomic
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi Laurent

I have to apologize.  You are in fact correct.  Via VMware console I am only able to see 1024x768 resolution available in Yosemite.  Most times I am using Screen Sharing to connect to the VM from my Macbook Air and am able to get bigger resolutions from it.  But now that i logged into the vCenter console, I can only see that one resolution available.

Hopefully a patch will come out soon

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ustwostudio
Contributor
Contributor

There's two things at play here. One of which I've found a workaround for.

  1. BeamSync in OS X is one of the causes of the bad performance and Rich Trouton (@rtrouton) has a great fix on his blog for this. I run this on all our OS X VMs. Have it running from a LaunchAgent and it immediately cleans up 'lag' no display. The actual performance of the machine wasn't bad at all, just a display lag.
  2. The resolution issue... we're running vSphere 6, OS X is up-to-date, latest VMware Tools, 128MB video settings, 3D accelrator set to hardware... nothing will let me set a higher resolution for the VM. Really frustrating.

Edit: We have two Mac Pros, one 6,1 and one 5,1 both display the same issue.

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PaSavICT
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

We are running ESXI on a MacMini 6,2 with 16GB RAM, set video ram of the VM's to 128 MB but

still no resolution more then 1024x768. Think this is a limit of the Macmini's ?

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rawhide
Contributor
Contributor

... or a limit of esxi? 10.8.5 works fine, all resolutions available.

I upgraded a VM to 10.9 and to 10.10 and the resolution is fixed at 1024x768

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asteen
Contributor
Contributor

Hi

I am Running a Mac Mini6,2, with esxi 6U1 with a osx 10.10 guest and am also unable to change the resolution from 1024x768.

If anyone has had any luck with a solution, i would be very interested to hear it

Cheers

Adam

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PaSavICT
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

What we have seen is that when you connect to the  Guest OS from Fusion Pro, you can change the screen size it self and it sees that as a new resolution. But still not possible to change from in the system it self.

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lamw
Community Manager
Community Manager

Here's the work around that was recently developed, you can find more details in this blost post http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2015/10/heads-up-workaround-for-changing-mac-os-x-vm-display-resoluti...

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