cannot install ESXI on second partition

[dkurz8814]

I am trying to partition my Mac Mini machine so that I can dual boot ESXI and Mac OS. I have tried several things to get ESXI to see the second partition. I have tried this with both MSDOS, Mac OS Journaled, NTFS-none seem to get the installer to see drive. I know I can only have one drive marked active/bootable, so I am stuck.

I am able to create the boot  ISO but when I get into the ESXi installer process, it only sees the full Mac Mini drive and the installer drive, not the second partition.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks

[wila]

Hi,

If you want to run ESXi physical, but don't want to wipe macOS then use a USB stick and install ESXi on there.

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Wil

[dkurz8814]

That is what I did but I did not have any room for additional storage. Is my only option to get a larger USB drive (something greater than the 64 or 8GB that I have?)

[dkurz8814]

as a follow-up

If I were to get a 2nd internal hard drive, would I be able to install to that and keep MacOS?

[wila · Accepted solution]

Hi,

Having Virtual Machine storage on a USB disk doesn't work well, for various reasons. That is if you can even get that to work, because that already would involve some trickery.

Going for a 2nd harddisk is indeed the better path to do so.

Note that @lamw got netboot working with ESXi the other day, see also

https://twitter.com/lamw/status/819941750093418496

edit moved discussion from VMware Fusion® (for Mac) to VMware ESXi 6 as it has not really much to do with VMware Fusion beyond the macOS part.

--

Wil

[dkurz8814]

Thank You very much Wila for answer this and my other question last week. I am trying to get a more stable working environment for my server and client VMs to build a virtual network with DHCP, DNS, AD, etc.