How to Fix GUI never starts on macOS VMs on ESXi
This mini-guide provides a structural approach to troubleshoot and fix the issue.
Prerequisites
- Confirm your hardware specifications (CPU, GPU, Motherboard).
- Ensure you have a bootable recovery USB and backup your EFI.
Fix Steps
- Check if your GPU requires WhateverGreen or specific boot-args (e.g., agdpmod=pikera).
- Ensure Metal acceleration is fully supported for your macOS version.
- Update Lilu and WhateverGreen to the latest versions.
Verification
- Reboot and verify if the functionality is restored and stable under typical usage.
Original Question:
I'm using the Unlocker 3 from here https://github.com/hugepants/esxi-unlocker
I've never run into this issue before, but it even affects VMs running on nested ESXi hosts so I'm almost tempted to believe it's a problem specific to this hardware. This is on Netapp HCI .
When I go to boot a VM from an ISO, it gets to the point where the GUI would start and I get a beachball cursor and the apple logo is still visible. I've tested this on multiple versions of macOS including Lion, El Capitan, High Sierra, Mojave. same behavior.
I would be inclined to say the the Intel Xeon Silver CPU is not supported, but I can boot into single user mode just fine, and that shouldn't affect the virtual GPU presented to the VMs.
I'm not passing through a GPU or anything. just using the Vmware virtual graphics device. The intent was to create a pool of mac devices for testing rolling out our MDM strategy to non-Windows devices (all the devs that use Macs at work).
Any ideas what might be causing this issue?
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