Easily Create MacOS Virtual Machines with VirtualBuddy
VirtualBuddy offers a simple way to quickly virtualize MacOS (and Linux) on any Apple Silicon Mac, offering an easy method for developers, enthusiasts, and the curious to run multiple instances of MacOS on their Mac. And VirtualBuddy is speedy with great performance, plus it’s free and open source, so you can easily explore the world of virtual machines with no commitment aside from the disk storage and bandwidth required to setup a MacOS or Linux VM.
Whether you want to test out different versions of MacOS, or run particular software that is only compatible with certain versions, VirtualBuddy can make this process easier. You’ll be able to virtualize any version of MacOS that is usable by an Apple Silicon Mac, meaning macOS Monterey 12, MacOS Ventura 13, macOS Sonoma 14, MacOS Sequoia 15, and later, including the various active beta builds and point releases. You can also run ARM-based Linux distributions easily as well.
VirtualBuddy makes setting up a virtual machine for MacOS or Linux really quite easy, upon launching the app you will find an installation wizard that walks you through the setup process of creating a VM and using a specific selected version of MacOS, whether you’re using restore images (IPSW), package installers, or downloading directly from Apple CDN’s. You can also install Linux into a virtual machine easily through direct download of Ubuntu, or with a compatible iso image file.
If you’re unfamiliar with how to download an app from Github (as many are) then remember to head to the ‘releases’ section and, in this case, find the latest version available as a DMG file. Then it’s just a matter of mounting the image and copying VirtualBuddy to your Applications folder, like installing many other apps.
Launch VirtualBuddy and use the simple setup wizard to begin to configure your VM:
The default options are pretty decent for most user configurations:
Note: upon attempting to setup a virtual machine for MacOS you might encounter a message that says “a software update is required to install MacOS in a virtual machine” that can be fixed if it fails to resolve itself, usually by installing Xcode.
VirtualBuddy is lightweight, simple, and easy, but it’s also not the only virtualization option that is simple to use on the Mac. Modern Apple Silicon Macs are almost spoiled with options for setting up virtual machines, and another fantastic free option is UTM which is able to run Windows 11, Ubuntu, macOS Sonoma, and much more. There’s also VMWare Fusion, Docker-OSX, Viable, Parallels, VirtualBox, and others, which all may be better suited to your virtualization needs.
If this subject interests you, don’t miss our other virtual machine posts.
How can I run old VMs of MacOS Mojave, Snow Leopard, etc on a new Mac M4? I’m told that all this virtualization is limited to software & OSes that can use the same CPU chip physically present in the Mac.
I used to be able to run software that was written for Motorola CPUs: G3, G4, & G5 on Mac intel CPUs.
Now that we have M4 ARM CPUs, do I really need to keep old hardware around to run old software? Thanks for your insight
Nice if you have an ARM Mac.
How about some recommendations for running VMs on a fifteen-year-old Mac Pro 4,1?
VirtualBox for x86 is decent for free, Parallels and VMWare are good for paid, but virtualizing MacOS on ARM is very fast and hard to beat
If you feel like doing a little fairly easy work, you can upgrade the 4,1 Mac Pro to 5,1 with a firmware upgrade. From there you can Add a new graphics card. Once that’s done, you can run Mojave natively. I’ve done that with my Mac Pro 4,1 and its still running like a champ.