I hit the F11 key to accept the license agreement.Īt this point, the installer took a few minutes to scan the machine.ģ. When asked to begin the installation process, I hit the Enter key.Ģ. Once selected, the ESXi installer boot process began.ġ. Once booted from the CD, I was asked to select the ESXi 6.0 installer. NOTE: All screenshots of this process are from ESXi running inside of VMWare Fusion, but the Mac Mini install process was identical. The CD showed up with EFI Boot and Windows partitions, so I selected EFI Boot. When rebooting, I held down the Option key on my keyboard to allow the various boot drive options to appear, then selected the CD. Once I had the CD, I hooked up an Apple USB SuperDrive to the Mini, popped the newly-burned CD in and rebooted the Mini. All I needed to do was download a copy of the ESXi 6.0 installer ISO file from the VMware website, use Disk Utility to burn the ISO file to a CD and use that to install ESXi 6. Unlike my previous installation of ESXi 5.x on a 2011 Mac Mini Server, where I needed to add ethernet drivers to the stock ESXi 5.x installer, ESXi 6.0 will install and work without additional drivers or installer modification needed. Hyper-threading effectively doubles the number of available processors, so I would be upgrading from four available processors on my 2011 Mini to eight available processors on my 2012 in turn doubling the number of virtual machines which I could host and run inside of ESXi.

I opted to use the 2012 Mac Mini Server over the 2014 Mac Mini because the 2012 Mini Server uses quad-core processors with hyper-threading. Up until now I’ve been running ESXi 5.5.x on a 2011 Mac Mini, but with the release of ESXi 6.0 by VMware, I decided it was time to upgrade to new hardware. Something I’ve been doing for a while is running ESXi on my home server setup.

Mac make bootable usb for esxi