ESXi and network (and Mac OS 10)

I recently ran into a not so obvious problem. One of our virtual MOSX servers that was cloned from another ESXi host to a new one started to behave strangely network-wise. Mostly the network didn't work at all and ifconfig on command line and the GUI tool in System Preferences wasn't agreeing on the state of the network interfaces and such.

The cause of the problem showed to be that there were two active physical network interfaces in ESXI but only one was assigned any network (see picture below).

Once we remove the unused interface from ESXi and rebooted the weirdly behaving machine everything went back to normal. We have several Mac Minis of very similar model where both the builtin network card/port and a Thunderbolt adapter is used and that hasn't caused this kind of problem but on those machines both interfaces are active in ESXi and assigned to a network.

I don't know if this is specific for the combination of ESXi 5.5 and Mac OS 10.9 or if it also would apply to other versions of Mac OS 10 or Linux/Windows virtualised in ESXi.

Mac OS X VMware virtualisation and migration

I have been testing to migrate a physical Mac Mini server, MOS 10.8.5 + Server 2.2.1, to a virtualised MOS 10.9.2 + server 3.1.1 which I broke down to migrating a MOS 10.8.5 + Server 2.2.1 Mac Mini Server to a virtualised MOS 10.8.5 + Server 2.2.1 which I then upgraded to MOS 10.9.2 + Server 3.1.1. Since it was my first experiences with VMware ESXi it was some trial-and-error and searching among settings but I found a way which I think is my preferred way to migrate a Mac to VMware ESXi so far. It will probably be updated but this works fine.

First, do a Time Machine backup of the old Mac. I will from here on call the Mac Mini Server with MOS 10.8.5 and Server 2.2.1 ferretsrv001. It should be possible to do a Time Machine copy to a Time Machine Server but it's a little more stable and a lot quicker in many cases to actually do it to an external drive which then is moved to the physical host for the virtualised Mac(s). Passing a USB device to the virtual machine is done by right-clicking the virtual machine and clicking Edit settings and adding a USB device (this can of course not be done until the virtual machine is created).

While your Time Machine backup is doing it's thing or when you have it ready you need to install a clean Mac OS on a virtual machine to mimic the pre-installed system on a ferretsrv001 to get a recovery partition and so on. We did this from a NetInstall server. To get it to start from there we checked that it had no other boot source available then it fell back on NetInstall.

Once you have a clean install update it if needed just in case it would effect the anything involved in boot or recovery. When you have the installed and updated system go to Edit settings for the virtual machine and go to Options tab. Here you check Force EFI setup and reboot the virtual machine.

When the virtual machine boots again it will go into EFI where you can add boot alternatives.

Choose Boot Maintenance Manager.

Choose Configure Boot Options.

Choose Add Boot Option

Choose Recovery HD

Choose com.apple.recovery.boot

Choose boot.efi

Set a description that you will recognize later on. Commit changes and exit.

Exit the Boot Maintenance Manager.

Choose Boot Manager

Choose Your description from earlier and the machine will boot into the Recovery partition

From here you can do a clean install with recovery from a Time Machine backup. Doing it this way works, in my experience, better than doing from inside an installed system.

If you're doing an recovery from Time Machine from within an installed system be sure to create a temporary admin account, log into this and remove all accounts that might be present in the Time Machine backup. If you don't do this you might get mismatches between user names/Full Names and the system's user ID which in turn will turn ownerships and permissions upside down. If you do it from Recovery partition everything on the chosen partition will be overwritten and the risk never exists.

When you have your migrated ferretsrv001 you can take a snapshot and upgrade to 10.9 and Server 3 or do other tests and if anything goes wrong revert to snapshot.

Mac OS 10.9.0 and Server 3.0.0 and VPN server fails

The combo of Mac OS 10.9.0, Server 3.0.0 and the service VPN server is no winner at the current state. At least with 10.9.0 clients there's big problems (server refusing connections). It's possible to do a workaround though by (back up the binary first) exchanging the 10.9.0 /usr/sbin/racoon binary for one from 10.8 and Server 2. What worked for my was a binary from 10.8.5 (incl Supplementary Update) and Server 2.2.1.

Google Drive and Mac OS 10.9.0

Apparently Google Drive crashes Finder in Mac OS 10.9.0 :-/

Finder restarts automatically and then get killed and so on the loops.