*drool* Anyway, I am going off on a tangent again but there is SO MUCH TINKERING TO DO and only so many hours in the day, so just load up the Proxmox VE DVD, turn ON the Mac Mini, and hold the C key while it boots. Maybe one day I will document that setup on here because I now have a Synology NAS and will soon “centralize” my storage so I can play with stuff like vMotion, DRS, HA, etc. I run my other Mac Mini with VMware ESXi 5.5 but it is running off a USB stick and since it has two drives, one drive serves as a local datastore for ESXi while the other is split in two between OSX and Windows – Three OS Option for the win. This Mac Mini only has one 1TB drive and since it was mothballed I do not care if it wipes everything although you might care, so be warned and in the future I might go with the “ Proxmox on USB” option.

Remember, that if you install Proxmox VE this way, you will lose the ability to boot into OSX or any other OS you might have set up, like Bootcamp so I am treating this machine as a dedicated “server”. Yes, I have a V-shaped corner desk, so one side is just for tinkering. So let’s get right to it, but first you need to know what I am using: It turns out that getting Proxmox VE installed on the Mac Mini is “plug and play”, so this is just for other noobs to see how easy it is and I might come back later because I cannot deny Proxmox’s awesomeness. I have become spoiled working with ESXi, which natively supports Mac VMs so I will probably give up on Proxmox VE for now, but I figured I would throw up what I have done just for “posterity’s sake”. This walkthrough was being written up, because I could not find a walkthrough for Proxmox VE 4.4 (latest) and the Mac Mini (6,2 model) but once I was done, I realized that running a Mac VM requires “hacking” stuff together. I love the Mac Mini since it allows you to create “virtuals” for Windows, Linux, or Mac without having to “hack” anything together, so I was tempted to investigate this “free” Open Source alternative. To that end, I found a Mac Mini mothballed in my closet and got sidetracked tinkering around with Proxmox VE because I read about how it supports a mixed VM/Container environment.

So I decided that I need to “dust off” and upgrade my VMware Home Lab because I have been using VirtualBox on my workstation, but I really need something bigger (and centralized) to learn all these new Container and Automation platforms. Well, this was not a planned walkthrough but the BIG WHALE in the datacenter nowadays is Docker and unfortunately most of us have to learn new technology on our own time at home.

Burn vmware esxi iso to usb mac