Hot off the heels of WWDC, Apple has made available the next major update to it’s flagship operating system for Mac. With a new name, macOS, Apple seems to be getting away from the OS X moniker and aligning with the rest of the OS’s that it has in it’s bag: tvOS, iOS, watchOS, and now macOS.
Users have been excited to run this in a VM to test, but it doesn’t “just work” in Fusion yet unfortunately. The reason is that Developer Preview builds have debugging code included which changes the memory layout of the installer. We specifically require a certain block layout of the .app to create the bootable install image, but because the layout is different due to debugging code, it fails with an ‘Internal Error’.
There are 2 ways to get around this:
- Install 10.11 and upgrade it to 10.12
- Manually create the bootable install image and attach it to an empty 10.11 VM.
The first one is pretty easy, and you can make an OS X 10.11 VM using the recovery partition with just a couple of clicks from File > New.
Once it’s up and you’ve installed VMware Tools, you can drag the ‘Install 10.12 Developer Preview.app’ onto the desktop of your 10.11 VM, double-click it and begin the install.
For folks that don’t have the time or who want to walk through a fresh installation there is a multi-step method that I’ve written about here that will show you the way and explain what’s happening along the trip.
www.mikeroysoft.com/macos-sierra-on-fusion-8/
For folks who want to run Sierra on the Mac itself and use Fusion, there is a bit of a bug that we’re working on, but there’s an easy workaround.
Currently if you try to run a VM it will fail/crash with an ‘Internal Error’.
The simple work around for now is to disable 3D graphics acceleration (per-VM setting).
It’s possible that this ‘goes away’ when Apple moves to the public beta branch (it has different debugging code enabled than the developer previews), but we’ll be keeping a close eye on things as they develop and share what we learn.
Overall, I’ve found that macOS Sierra as a Host and as a Guest work pretty well. Siri tends to work better on the Host in my experience, so we’ll be examining how to make it a smooth experience in a VM as well. For now, my advice is to speak slowly to her when she’s ‘trapped’ in a VM 😉
(talking about AI with ‘he’ and ‘she’ is weird… welcome to the future!)
Pingback: Michael Tsai - Blog - WWDC 2016 Links
Thank you for this blog, I was wondering if there was a workaround for the internal error VM crash issue, but was too busy to look until now.
I will be trying this later, and hope for my sake that it works.
Thank you for this, very helpful.
Just a quick point: it also works pretty well on Fusion 7.x, except that VMware tools won’t install…
I’ve upgraded a Mac OS X 10.11 MBP to macOS Sierra, and since then, none of my VMs can get network enabled, meaning, while before I was able to access the internet from my VM, after the upgrade, I’m no longer able to do so, and I have tried all possible permutations of the network setting in the VM. I have this problem with a linux fedora 20 VM, and with a windows 7 desktop VM as well.
As anyone seen this bug in your testing of macOS Sierra with VMware Fusion 8?
Thanks.
The following comment was really really helpful.
“Currently if you try to run a VM it will fail/crash with an ‘Internal Error’.
The simple work around for now is to disable 3D graphics acceleration (per-VM setting).”
OK. Thanks for the tip.
However –
“3D acceleration cannot be changed until the virtual machine is shut down. To change 3D acceleration, first resume the virtual machine and then shut it down.” !!
Select the Virtual Machine, hold down Option and go to the Virtual Machine menu and select Power Off. This’ll let you force it to shutdown and you can change the option.
i got the ‘internal error’ message as well. unchecking / disabling 3D graphics acceleration did the trick. it loaded windows for me! THANK YOU
To Get my Virtual Machines to Run on VMWare Fusion (8.1.1) on a MacOS 10.12 host (macOS 10.12 Beta (16A238m)) I had to do the following:
1) Remove the saved state from the machine (like hard rebooting a machine, so any in progress work will be lost)
1.1) Go to the file for your Virtual Machine using the Finder
1.2) Right-Click on the file and select “Show Package Contents”
1.3) Delete any files with the following file extensions: *.VMSS &. *.LCK
1.4) Open the .VMX file in a plain text editor (I used Visual Studio Code for Mac, TextWrangler, BBEdit, vim, nano, etc… would also work)
1.5) find the line with checkpoint.vmState = “SomeFileName”. and change it to be just: checkpoint.vmState = “”
1.66) Save the file and close it from your text editor
2) Clearing the Graphics conflict
2.1) Go back to VMWare Fusion, and open the settings for your Virtual Machine.
2.2) In the Display settings remove the option for accelerated 3D Graphics
3) Start up your Virtual Machine.
The VM runs slower, but at least you can get in and do stuff.
Running Fusion 8.1.1 on a host with a physical OS of OS X 10.11.6, I copied a guest version of 10.11.6, booted it, and through this guest I enrolled in Developer, downloaded the upgrade tool, and ran it directly inside of the VM. Install took about 30 minutes and was without issue…even with graphics acceleration enabled. I’m guessing Beta 3 fixed something to stop the error caused by hardware accel. I must say that for a beta which is still months away from a stable release, it’s quite refined. With that said I’m not all that surprised given how El Capitan fixed the hoard of issues with Yosemite, so they had a solid foundation to build upon.
Can someone point me to the right website link or forum for – kernel debugging using Fusion VM on OSX ? Up until 10.10 this works with Fusion 8, but for later version(s) of osx it does not work.
Pingback: macOS Sierra in the wild - TFindley Technical
I downloaded and installed the “Create Mavericks Installer.tool”. If I drag it to th VM icon, I am told ‘Unknown file type “tool”‘. I did the two sudo commands. I tried starting the VM while pressing option.
I still get an uncaught exception. I still can’t select [Show Details], [Crash], or [Continue]. I stil can switch over to the 2nd virtual screen and see black. I still have to force quit the process to get out. I can’t even select the apple to kill it unless I move to my 2nd monitor.
The only thing I use VMware anymore is to run an application that needs Windows XP (it won’t run under newer Windows). I installed MacOS Sierra yesterday.