So let’s start there, with virtualizing Sierra on top of High Sierra. (A clause explicitly permitting virtualization on a Mac host first appears in the SLA of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.) Many posts online detail these, but they’re out of date and no longer work.Īs I write this, 10.13 High Sierra is the newest version of macOS, and 10.12 Sierra is the next most recent. What’s a more recent development is being able to easily virtualize macOS without engaging in legally questionable maneuvers. Luckily, there’s a solution that’s inexpensive on both the cost and time dimensions: virtualizing macOS on top of your existing machine. The cost only increases if you’re trying to diagnose an issue towards the tail end of a procedure. It’s not cost-effective to have spare developer-grade machines lying around just to test installation procedures, nor is it time-effective to be wiping and rebuilding machines either. How do we agree on anything? The obvious answer is that a fresh OS install on a specific type of machine is our common starting point - it’s a fixed point in time. But if all our machines are unique and acquire crud and customizations over time, there are bound to be disagreements: along the lines of “that works on my machine”, and “well not on my machine”. We need robust documentation and scripts to make that happen smoothly. So as developers, we still spend a decent portion of our daily life outside of containers. Containerization technology like Docker is a huge help here, and we use Docker at Rally for many tasks. Builds that are reliable and reproducible are a great thing.

Mac os virtualization