Today Apple seeded the first Public beta of macOS 10.13 High Sierra, making it available for all interested Mac users through the Apple Beta Software program.
We’ve written about how to run 10.13 in a Virtual Machine before, and previously there was a couple of hacks to do in order to get it running. This is just part of the fun of being on the ‘bleeding edge’, and thankfully with Fusion doing all this in a virtual environment makes it pretty painless.
With the recent release of Fusion 8.5.8 we did several behind-the-scenes changes, and while the release notes were a bit light on details for a variety of reasons, we did manage to make the process of testing out macOS High Sierra in a VM much easier.
The two main problems previously were that a) We would get the error about Fusion being ‘unable to create the installation medium’, and b) the lack of APFS support in our virtual EFI implementation.
For the ‘Unable to create installation medium’ issue, for which we had a community contribution to help work around that which we posted to our github page, we have since addressed the issue and the user-submitted code is not required. Big thanks to norio-nomura over on github for taking the time to submit those changes. While we did not use code from that pull request to accomplish our task, we sincerely appreciate the community digging in and contributing.
Users can now simply drag the ‘Install macOS High Sierra.app’ directly on to Fusion’s New VM wizard and it will ‘do the right thing’.
The second problem was lack of support for APFS, rendering the OS unbootable if the user chose the ‘covert drive to APFS’ option from the installer.
This issue is now simply resolved and the VM should boot just fine.
We don’t officially support High Sierra in a VM, and don’t recommend it in production environments, but by and large things seem to be working well as a VM with Fusion 8.5.8.
How has your experience been? We’d love to hear how your testing has been going, what you like and what drives you crazy both about macOS and about Fusion!
