macOS 11 beta in a VM

-
I've been having some fun getting macOS11 (also referred to as macOS 10.16 during install) Big Sur beta 1 running in a VM within VMware Fusion. If you've not met Fusion before, it's VMware's hypervisor for the Apple Mac. It's a really useful tool for a lot of people right now as Apple has given developers access to the first beta code this week and Fusion allows us to test the new release running in a VM.

As usual, running unsupported, pre release software sometimes brings up challenges...

Downloaded the macOS 11 beta installer from Apple. It's about 10GB so may take a little while. Then I obtained a USB stick (16GB minimum) and formatted it with Disk Utility leaving the default name of Untitled. Then, using Terminal, I ran the following command to create the installer and make the media bootable...

sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ 10.15\ Beta.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ macOS\ 11\ Beta.app




Once this had finished, I created a new VM with 50GB Hard Disk and 4GB of memory, mounted the USB stick into the VM and booted it. The install was pretty much the same as any other recent macOS install...





After running through the initial setup, and a reboot later, it's time to log in for the first time...



But, it didn't work! I get to enter my password which it accepted and then the screen went blank and returned me to the log in prompt again. So, today I tried building another VM from scratch and got exactly the same result. Time to try a different approach. I booted up a VM that had the previous version of macOS installed (Catalina) and copied the installer into that and tried to run the setup again.

New problem - The disk was too small. So, shut the VM down and made the disk larger and increased the size of the partition in Disk Utility. Time to kick off the installation again!

The disk was still too small. Grrr! So I repeated the previous steps and made it even larger then ran the install once more.

After a little while...

Tadaaaa!!! Go me :-)
I think I'll wait and keep an eye on the forums to see if anyone else is having similar problems with a fresh install in a VM and I'll report back when I find out more.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What's New With Each Release Of vSAN

-
I thought it would be useful to summarise a list of what's new with each new version of vSAN seeing as though it gets updated quite frequently... vSAN 7.0 U3 Cluster Shutdown Feature vLCM support for Witness Appliance Skyline Health Correlation IO Trip Analyzer Nested Fault Domains for 2-Node Clusters Enhanced Stretch Cluster durability Access Based Enumeration for SMB shares via vSAN Files Services See - https://core.vmware.com/blog/vsan-7-update-3-whats-new vSAN 7.0 U2 VMware vSAN HCI Mesh capabilities vSAN Stretched cluster Functionality and Scale Improvements vSAN File Services Interoperability and Scale Improvements vSphere Proactive HA Support vSphere Native Key Provider Health Check History Performance Top Contributors Network Diagnostics See - https://cormachogan.com/2021/03/30/vsan-7-0-u2-whats-new/ vSAN 7.0 U1 vSAN File Services now supports the SMB protocol vSAN File Services now supports Kerberos and Active Directory vSAN File Services Scale Increase Introducing Disaggr...
Read more

Requirements to become a VCP-DCV 2020

-
Image
Want to become VMware VCP - DCV certified but not sure of the requirements? This is a question I am asked a lot on the Install Configure Manage course I teach so I thought I'd explain what the requirements and the steps are. There are several levels of certification from VMware, VCA, VCP, VCAP and VCDX and there are different certification tracks that you can study - Data Center, Network, Cloud Management & Automation and Desktop & Mobility.  In this post, I am going write about the VMware Certified Professional - Data Center Virtualisation or VCP-DCV as it's written in short. The first thing that we need to know is that the certification you gain now carries the year you became certified rather than the product version, so if you fulfilled the requirements to be a VCP-DCV this year, you would become a VCP-DCV 2020. The steps to become a VCP-DCV 2020 are listed in the Certification section under Education Services on VMware's website... https://www.vmware.com...
Read more

New Professional vSphere 7.x Exam Released

-
Image
There's been some big news this week about VMware certification involving the release of the new Professional VMware vSphere 7.x exam. So, what does this mean and how does it affect someone wishing to become VCP certified? As there are a number of technology areas you can achieve a VCP certification in, this post is going to look at the 'VCP - Data Center Virtualisation' track. https://www.vmware.com/education-services/certification/vcp-dcv-7-exam.html To start with, back in Feb 2019 VMware changed the naming of the VCP certification to now include the year you passed the exam rather than specifying the version of vSphere that you had studied and were examined on. So last year we had the VCP-DCV 2019 and this year will be the VCP-DCV 2020. If you are already a VCP 2020 then passing this new exam won't gain you anything extra. If, however if you do not currently have a VCP then VMware have dropped the requirement that meant you had to take and pass the Foundations exam. ...
Read more