Virtualizing Macs with ATTO ThunderLink® Thunderbolt™ Adapters

The Apple Mac mini® and prior generation Apple Mac Pro® rely on Thunderbolt™ ports for high-performance expansion. Beyond adding or upgrading storage and GPU capabilities, what else can you do with a Mac’s Thunderbolt port? You can virtualize it!

Last year about this time ATTO Technology drew the attention of both the Mac® and VMware® communities after one of our engineers tested the viability of virtualizing the Apple Mac Pro using ATTO hardware.

Our VMware expert, Eric Garrison, published on his blog a guide that makes it easy to virtualize the second-generation Mac Pros or any microserver with a Thunderbolt connection. All that is required is an ATTO ThunderLink® Thunderbolt adapter using ATTO VMware Ready™ certified ESXi drivers.

ATTO ThunderLink Thunderbolt Fibre Channel adapters are designed as purpose-built devices. With a smaller footprint and less power required, you achieve the same throughput with a singular device compared to other Thunderbolt-enabled solutions. Application Development, VDI, Cloud hosting or Shared private clouds are just a handful of use cases. ThunderLink adapters can easily fit into new or existing VSphere® environments.