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by thoughtsimple 1585 days ago
That’s not true. VMWare has worked well for years. I used on my Intel Macs for years.
1 comments

It is true, and its well documented:

"The OS X EULA does allow for OS X to be virtualized on Apple hardware as both host and guest. This is why (as you note) VMware Workstation does not support OS X virtualization, but Fusion, ESXi, and vSphere do. All versions of VMware's apps check to ensure that you are running on Apple hardware and you are running a supported OS (as not all versions of OS X allow virtualization)."

I am trying to get Snow Leopard+Rosetta virtualized under Mac OS 10.10 Yosemite, as well as get Mac OS 10.8 Lion to run under Snow Leopard ( software requirements, and supporting PowerMac application, Freehand ).

Its a total complete uphill battle, that apple does not want to happen:

"You are completely correct that the EULAs are unclear about the question of running 3+ OS X VMs on a single OS X host. This is a legal question, and not a technical one. For that matter, so is the limitation about which versions of OS X can be virtualized (ex: 10.6 virtualization requires the Server edition, and all VMware applications block you from virtualizing the Standard edition)."

So, it actually is true, and there is proof in VMWare's documentation.

Shall I quote that too?

You’re saying that ‘traditionally’ Apple hasn’t supported this, but your examples are 10+ years old. Apple has been supporting virtualization of macOS for quite a while now, both with their own frameworks (hypervisor previously, now Virt framework) and 3rd party hypervisors.

It’s true that “once upon a time” it wasn’t supported, but those days are long past.

Traditionally Apple has supported it when it shipped hardware: Apple ][ to 68K (1991), 68k to PPC (1994), PPC to Intel(2006), and Now Intel to Mx(2020), but a few years after, its not a feature. 6 years, is 4 generations, like 100 human years. Why are the Classic and PowerPC emulators so popular? People want them.

I had someone bring in a Franklin Ace Apple II clone. There are Apple ][ emulators too. Not just for nostalgia, but for applications that are no longer supported or being developed.

I can run DOS on a Core II duo after 40 years.

My point is Apple emulation is only profitable when selling hardware, don't even think its nifty, when its dumped like old fish.

Old versions of macOS requiring the server version for use inside a VM was dumb, but there's nothing technically or legally difficult about satisfying that requirement.
Dumb or not. How do I get Rosetta to run on SLS? Snow Leopard Server? under Fusion w/ Yosemite as the hypervisor? I need to run Freehand PPC.
It works totally fine, the hardest part is finding a (legal) copy of SLS (if you care about that). I run CodeWarrior on SLS on top of Fusion on Mojave.
FWIW, Virtualization attempts to enforce this limit internally.