F11 Key for nested ESXi with MAC OS X
In my home office and abroad I use a MAC Powerbook with VMware fusion quite a bit and most recently I was installing ESXi to a Fusion VM. Kindly enough the ESXi install program asked me to push F11 to continue, and when I pushed F11 my wonderful MAC translated this as the MAC function — shrink the screen.
By default, the MAC function keys are for MAC purposes vs. the standard function key they are intended. After doing a bit of searching I found two options. 1 – You can use the keypress as I described below or 2 – you can adjust your MAC settings under keyboard and uncheck “Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys”
At this point, I didn’t want to change the overall behavior of my MAC and I went with option 1. To issue the F11 key in a fusion VM simply Press FN-CMD-F11 and this allows the ESXi install to continue.