2nd hackintosh, the "ESXi Threadrippintosh"

I built my first bare-metal hackintosh earlier in the week, feel free to check it out here.

That was really a trial run for my ultimate goal of a dual-head workstation with 10.15 and Windows 10 on KVM. I'm still struggling with learning KVM as I'm a VMWare guy at work, so it's what I know.

I decided to see if I could get MacOS booted in ESXi on my home lab server as a next step to feeling it out under a hypervisor. Since ESXi has "native" support for MacOS (on Apple metal or with an unlocker) I figured it would be an easier first step.

The guts of it all. Wires could be prettier.

https://preview.redd.it/bp5ishdyu9a41.png?width=1178&format=png&auto=webp&s=fecae3a7ecdfb72d962b9ac1ff6598b7b8479457

Hardware:

• AMD Threadripper 1950x OC @ 4Ghz
• 64GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 3200 DDR4
• Drained, cleaned and refilled Enermax Liqtech II TR4 360
• EVGA GTX 1080ti FTW 3 hybrid (for Windows gaming VM)
• MSI Gaming X 1080 (for Windows ArcGIS terminal server workstation)
• Adaptec 72405 24 channel RAID controller
• Intel X540 10Gb NIC SFP+
• 3 x NVME SSDs standalone, 4x SATA SSDs (RAID), 5x 4TB HDDs (RAID), 2x 2TB HDDs (RAID)

Software:

• ESXi 6.7 Update 3b
• vCenter 6.7 Update 3b OVA
• ESXi unlocker 3
• AMD OSX prebuilt Mojave .VMDK
• Various VMs with W10, Server 2019, Ubuntu, etc.

Future plans:

• Build vanilla Catalina VM from scratch
• Buy a single slot Radeon Pro GPU and fight to the death with PCIe passthrough

I built the Mojave VM in Fusion on my MBP 16" but never booted it (due to AMD kernel). Once I got it built the way I wanted and made the necessary .VMX edits I just uploaded it to the ESXi host. I am very appreciative of the prebuilt .VMDK from AMD OSX, but I plan to build my own vanilla one from scratch using Opencore.

With that under my belt I'll return to the ultimate prize of the dual-head workstation on KVM with my 9900k box.