Interestingly one of the new features in Sun Oracle’s VirtualBox 3.2 Beta is:
- Experimental support for Mac OS X guests
I’m curious how they implemented that so that they steer clear of Apple’s legal team. I’m also curious how that runs. I may need to give that a try.
6 replies on “VirtualBox 3.2 Beta Supports Mac OS X Guests”
FWIW, VMware Fusion has had support for this for a few months; the way they got around the legal stuff was to put a check in there for ensuring they’re running on Mac hardware.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens here if VirtualBox didn’t do that.
@Preed: From what I’ve read, it sounds like support is regardless of host, but perhaps I’m not understanding that right.
I haven’t tried it myself, but Sander van Leeuwen from Oracle says on the VirtualBox forums:
“Installing Mac OS X will only work on Apple hardware. Anything else is a violation of the Apple end-user license and is not going to work.”
http://forums.virtualbox.org/v.....28#p134643
Parallels have offered the feature for some time too, but again, Mac OS X guests can only be installed on Mac OS X hosts.
I’m guessing it’s not in the Open Source Edition (OSE) then.
Read the documentation: it works only with OS X Server because Server is already designed to be virtualized, and it runs only on Apple hardware because VBox does not bypass or imitate Apple hardware identification. Don’t expect to run an OS X client guest on a Windows box. This is solely for server admins who want another VM solution.