VMware have announced and fixed a vulnerability in VMware Tools across macOS, Linux and Windows guests. Please ensure that you update the guest tools which can be found here https://vmware.com/go/tools.
This project is now archived.
The unlocker should continue to run as there have been few changes to the VMware code in many years. I have stopped developemnt as I no longer use VMware but would be happy to refer to a fork if someone sends me an email with the relevant details.
There is also Auto Unlocker which is still active.
Unlocker 4 is designed for VMware ESXi 7.
The Unlocker enables certain flags and data tables that are required to see the macOS type when setting the guest OS type, and modify the implmentation of the virtual SMC controller device. These capabiltiites are normally exposed in Fusion and ESXi when running on Apple hardware.
The patch code carries out the following modifications dependent on the product being patched:
It is important to understand that the Unlocker cannot add any new capabilities to VMware ESXi but enables support for macOS that is disabled in the VMware products when run on non-Apple hardware.
The Unlocker cannot:
or any other features that are not already in the VMware compiled code.
The code is written in Python and has no pre-requisites and should run directly from the release zip download.
You will then need to run one of the following commands to patch or unpatch the ESXi software.
Thanks to Zenith432 for originally building the C++ Unlocker and Mac Son of Knife (MSoK) for all the testing and support.
Thanks also to Sam B for finding the solution for ESXi 6 and helping me with debugging expertise. Sam also wrote the code for patching ESXi ELF files and modified the Unlocker code to run on Python 3 in the ESXi 6.5 environment.
Thanks to lucaskamp for testing the new version 4 of ESXi Unlocker.