Any external SSD connected via a 5Gbps or 10Gbps USB connection or the Thunderbolt bus should feel fast enough for most things – I use a cheap NVMe SSD in a 10Gbps USB-C enclosure, not exactly this one, but a similar one.Enlarge / Virtualizing macOS releases like the Ventura beta is a good way to experiment without destroying your operating system’s main install.
Mac users with limited internal storage may want to switch to an external drive to save space, as the default disk size for new macOS virtual machines is 64GB. And more is better, especially if you’ll also be running heavy applications like Xcode alongside (or inside) your virtual machine.īy default, VirtualBuddy saves all your files (including virtual machine disk images) in the Documents folder of your user account. Personally, I wouldn’t recommend trying to virtualize macOS on an Apple Silicon Mac with less than 16GB of RAM. But you’ll be running two completely separate operating systems on the same computer, and that comes with RAM and storage requirements. VirtualBuddy and the virtualization framework do not have strict and fast requirements other than requiring an Apple Silicon chip for macOS virtualization on macOS. You’ll also want to pay attention to the hardware requirements for virtualization.
With Xcode beta installed, everything works as expected (but if you can find a way to get this to work without installing a 33GB app that takes over an hour to install, I’d love to hear about it).
When I tried this without Xcode installed, macOS tried (and failed) to download additional software to get it to work, kind of like macOS needs to download additional software the first time you use Rosetta.
If you’re looking to virtualize Ventura over Monterey, you’ll want to install and run the Xcode 14 beta from Apple’s developer site before you begin. If you want to virtualize macOS Monterey on top of macOS Monterey, you don’t have to download anything else.
But it’s a cool way to run old operating systems on a shiny new Mac, and UTM’s VM gallery includes sample VMs for many Linux distributions, classic Mac OS, and Windows XP and Windows 7.
Like all emulation, this comes with a performance penalty. QEMU can emulate other processor architectures, including but not limited to x86 and PowerPC. This is the application that we will use to configure our sample virtual machine in this guide.Īnother application worth looking into is UTM, which uses the virtualization framework to run ARM operating systems in addition to the ARM version of macOS, but also provides a user-friendly interface to the QEMU emulation software.
My favorite for running macOS on top of macOS is VirtualBuddy, which streamlines the process of downloading the files you need to get a Monterey or Ventura virtual machine up and running. Still, some independent developers have built free, simple applications on top of the virtualization framework that provides a GUI for customizing settings and juggling multiple guest operating systems. Typically the purview of paid software like Parallels Desktop or VMWare Fusion, virtualization allows you to run multiple operating systems on a Mac at the same time, which is useful for anyone who wants to run Linux on top of macOS, test an application are developing on different versions of macOS, or check out the latest beta version of macOS Ventura without risking your core installation.Īpple’s documentation and sample projects provide everything you need to get a simple virtual machine up and running without the need for additional software. One of the best Mac features for power users from the Apple Silicon era is Apple’s virtualization framework. Enlarge / Virtualizing versions of macOS like the Ventura beta is a good way to experiment without messing up your core OS installation.