Create a VM from a physical OS X SSD partition?

[dstranathan]

I have a SSD sliced into 2 partitions on my MacBook. One is a partition for production work (my "daily driver"). The other partition is running OS X 10.11 El Capitan for testing. I boot back and forth as needed when I want to test El Cap.

My company just purchased licenses for VMWare Fusion 7 Pro. Im making a few OS X test VMs this week.

I'd like to P-to-V my El Capitan partition into a VM, but I can't seem to find a way to do this.

Fusion provides lots of ways to skin this cat, but not from an existing OS X physical volume - or at least a non-Recovery or non-Boot Camp volume anyway. Am I missing something?

Anyone have some Fusion Foo they care to share with me? I assume there must be some CLI magic to do this under the hood.

[roiegat]

I haven't been able to find a way to do it in Fusion just yet. What I did was create a image with 10.10 on it and then ran the upgrade to 10.11 on it so I can test it out. Would be nice to see if there is a way to capture an actual image of a drive and use that.

[mpermann]

Can you make an image of the 10.11 partition with either Composer or Disk Utility and then restore that into the virtual disk in VMWare Fusion? I NetBoot my VMWare Fusion environments all the time and image it using either Casper Imaging or simply using Disk Utility to put down a plain OS without any Casper bits for testing purposes.

[karthikeyan_mac]

Hi,

We do the same scenario in Parallels not sure will work with Fusion.

1. Make DMG of the 10.11 El Capitan partition (Disk Utility)
2. Install any 10.10(or any OS X ) in VM Ware Fusion
3. Create addition Virtual Disk for the installed OS in VM Properties
4. Created Disk will show up as another partition in Virtual Machine
5. Restore your 10.11 El Capitan partition image to the other partition in VM
6. Change startup disk in VM to boot with the new 10.11 El Capitan partition
7. Once it works, delete the first Virtual disk created. You will have only 10.11 El Capitan OS in VMware Fusion

Hope this helps.

Thanks & Regards,
Karthikeyan

[bentoms]

It's been a while since I created my 10.11 VM, but am sure I used AutoDMG (ignoring some warnings), & then @chilcote excellent vFuse to convert it to a VMware Fusion VM.

vFuse should work with Composer captured OS.dmg's too.