First we’ll use fdisk to find the device:Ĥ0e5ca413f3a9f9a0d70acc004d9c21b. We’re going to mount the USB so we can interact with the files. Once it restarts, you can shutdown (and delete) the VM. When you get to the reboot screen, hit enter to let the VM shutdown. Select the USB drive, and continue with the installation, selecting a keyboard layout and setting a good password. Then, when the ESXi installer boots, the USB drive should be one of the options: While the machien is booting, we need to get our USB drive to be recognized by the VM, by going to Player -> Removable Devices -> -> Connect (Disconnect from host). In the wizard, we’ll select the ESXi 6.5 ISO.Ĭontinuing through the rest of the dialogs, making sure to give the machine at least 4GB of ram. In VMWare Player, Player -> New Virtual Machine. While I typically use VirtualBox for almost everything, I actually had much better luck getting the USB drive recognized in VMWare Player, so that’s what I’ll show here. Move the USB over to the Mac Pro to boot.Modify some of the boot files to work in the 32-bit EFI.There are several posts out there about how to do this that I leaned on (1, 2 primarily). Download the iso, burn it to disk, pop that disk and a USB drive into the machine, turn it on, and install.īut while the MacPro 1,1 is a 64-bit machine, it runs off a 32-bit EFI architecture, and unfortunately, ESXi stopped supporting 32-bit EFI a few releases ago. Were this some shiny new hardware, the post would be short. But now it’s time to get it running on my 2006 MacPro. I’ll be learning about it in future posts. I’ve selected ESXi because it’s free, and it allows me to manage multiple VMs from a headless machine. Getting the hypervisor installed is the next step.

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