Step 5 - Add ESXi offline bundle that we download by running the following command:Īdd-EsxSoftwareDepot ESXi550-201410001.zip Step 4 - Once PowerCLI has been installed go ahead and launch the it and we are ready to start authoring our ISO image Image Builder is part of the PowerCLI toolkit which can be downloaded here. To do so, you will need a Windows system as it uses a tool called VMware Image Builder which is only available for Windows. Step 3 - Next you need to convert this offline bundle into an ISO image that you can load onto a USB device, this is the simplest way to install ESXi. You can do so by going to VMware Patche portal and under ESXi, you should find ESXi550-201410001.zip at the very top. Step 2 - Once you have met the prerequisite, you will need to download the offline bundle for ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Patch03 which contains the Mac Pro 6,1 enablement along with other bug fixes. You can check the boot ROM by either following this Apple KB here or by running system info with an OS X image on a bootable USB device which is what I did to verify as seen in the screenshot below. Thanks Josh for sharing this tip with us! It turns out that there is not an EFI update and the ONLY way to update the boot ROM was to install Yosemite (OS X 10.10) as it contains an update which can be applied to the Mac Pro. This great piece of tidbit came from Josh who discovered issues while trying to install ESXi and found out this was a requirement after opening a case with Apple Engineering. Step 1 - A prerequisite that must be met prior to installing ESXi is to have the Apple boot ROM update on the Mac Pro 6,1 running on 05 or higher.
Luckily, I was able to borrow one of the Apple Mac Pro 6,1 we had within VMware Engineering for a couple of days to document the process.
I have received several questions from customers asking how to go about installing the latest ESXi 5.5 Update 2 Patch03 on the Apple Mac Pro 6,1.