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Virtualize Apple Silicon?
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Posted on 08-07-2021 07:21 AM
For the last several years I have used Mac VMs to test Jamf Pro policies and scripts. This has always worked really well. Now I am having to work with Apple Silicon Macs, and I have to wait until I enroll one to be able to test policies and workflows, then make the necessary changes. It would be great if I could virtualize an Apple Silicon Mac. Has anyone found a way to do this? My company has not yet bought one. I have been asking for that for months.
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Posted on 08-09-2021 07:35 AM
Last I heard, Parallels was working towards being able to virtualize macOS on an M1 chip. Supposed time frame was Fall 2021.
However, with a DFU restore on an M1, it isn't quite as bad as restoring an Intel mac. I can restore my test M1 in less than 5 minutes. Not quite as good as restore a snapshot, but not terrible either.
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Posted on 08-09-2021 12:51 PM
That's a good point. I was impressed at how fast restoring an M1 MacBook Air was when I was first testing my DEPNotify process on one last December. Until I have an actual Apple Silicon Mac to test with, I'm stuck having to wait to get the customer's Apple Silicon Macs to do my testing. That's not a good way to do this moving forward.
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Posted on 08-09-2021 12:08 PM
You can now Virtualize macOS on an M1 Mac with macOS Monterey!
Not sure if it can be adapted back to work with Big Sur - it sounds like there's a framework dependency requiring macOS 12 and I don't have an M1 to play with to try it out, but if I did I would.
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Posted on 08-09-2021 12:52 PM
This is promising. I look forward to seeing how this works out.
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Posted on 08-10-2021 07:16 AM
I have set one of these up and it will work pretty good. But so far I have not found a way to take a snapshot.
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Posted on 08-11-2021 07:48 AM
I forget, can you do a snapshot of a file with APFS? I had thought that it was a feature of a modern filesystem to be able to do atomic file updates so your 100GB VM disk image would have an additional 1MB atomic bit if you add 1MB of data to the drive in the VM.
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08-11-2021 07:53 AM - edited 08-12-2021 01:43 PM
Additional comment purged because @MikeF 's comment reappeared.
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Posted on 08-12-2021 01:48 PM
Well i tried with Parallels 17 on a mac mini and a imac. You have to be on Monterey but then you can just have it install a free mac os. Worked great. Only issue i could see was there is no way to adjust any settings. It works great unless you may want to change the nic to bridged mode. But this was the first version and they also say it is limited to Monterey with luck by the time Monterey is released they will be out with an improved version.
