VM for Testing Purposses within Silicion Chipset

[ManuelC]

Hey Everyone,

Kinda new on all related stuff for MDM and JAMF, so I'm figuring out how to properly perform tests on mac enviroments without everytime breaking my own laptop and certificate stuff to connect back and pull over everything from the scratch.

With that in mind, I've came with the idea of creating VM (Using VirtualBuddy) and enrolling it to jamf server through the jamf enrollment link... so far even everything seems to be good. I´m facing problems with the Self Service app, that it's not connecting.

Anyone else that has being tested this? or have any kind of solution to have an appart mac enviroment to break :) without the need of purchasing another macbook hehe :)

[AJPinto]

Officially Jamf does not Support VM's, but I use Virtual Buddy myself without issues. If SS is not connecting, try using the Jamf binary to see if it can connect, running recon should be good enough. Your VM may be having network issues but if it’s enrolling it could be something deeper. Make sure none of your security clients are causing problem and anything else you would check with a physical device.

Just be aware, the only way to really test thing with macOS is with a physical device. Not everything works correctly in VM's, also virtual buddy cannot test Automated Device Enrollment but other tools like Parallels can.

[sdagley]

@AJPinto Unless you're still using Intel based Macs to test ADE you are you are incorrect that VMs can be used to test ADE. No Mac virtualization tool running on Apple Silicon and using Apple's virtualization framework to create a virtualized Apple Silicon Mac (which is currently every Mac virtualization tool) can test ADE. That is due to the fact that Apple's virtualization framework does not support changing the serial number of the virtualized Mac to a real serial number to match an ABM/ASM record, and that is required for ADE to work.

[sdagley]

@ManuelC You really want to be testing ADE as that is the only way you should be enrolling Macs (unless you didn't have access to ABM/ASM that is). A 2nd test Mac is a small price to pay for being able to properly test your Mac management process. And with the DFU Restore capabilities of Apple Silicon Macs, and tools like Apple Configurator or DFU Blaster, it's quick & easy to put whatever version of macOS you want to test with on a test machine.

[ejadadic]

Since M1 silicon and virtualization lack proper support—and with serial number randomization—combined with Apple’s restrictions, the best-case scenario is limited.

If you need a solution like UTM, the free tier works fine for running Windows 11 on M1. However, running macOS as a VM on Apple hardware hasn’t been feasible since Catalina.

The best option might be an AWS instance using a bare metal Mac in the cloud. If your management approves it, I’d suggest going that route due to the Jamf + AWS partnership.

[sdagley]

@ejadadic There's no possibility of using an AWS Mac mini to do ADE enrollment testing, and given that @ManuelC seemed concerned about the cost of purchasing a dedicate Mac for testing I doubt they'd want to be  paying the AWS fees for a dedicated EC2 mini instance since that'd cover the cost of a physical Mac in less than two months.

[AJPinto]

Thanks for mentioning that. I have not used Parallels in a few years and thinking about it my last box I used it on was a 2019 MBP16.