Using macOS installer disk images to boot VMware Fusion virtual machines to macOS Recovery

Booting a VMware Fusion virtual machine to the macOS Recovery environment can be challenging, as Fusion uses Command-R as a keyboard shortcut for restoring snapshots.

This is the same keyboard shortcut as booting to macOS Recovery for Intel Macs so if you’re not very fast, or you don’t have the virtual machine window selected correctly, you may be looking at an unwanted request to restore a snapshot instead of macOS Recovery.

Fortunately, there’s a workaround for this behavior which will reliably get you into macOS Recovery. For more details, please see below the jump.

create_macos_vm_install_dmg updated for macOS Big Sur installer disk images

As part of testing macOS Big Sur 11.0.0, I’ve updated my create_macos_vm_install_dmg script. For more details, please see below the jump.

Building macOS installer disk images for virtual machines with create_macos_vm_install_dmg

A while back, I wrote a couple of scripts which built installers for Mac virtual machines:

• create_os_x_vm_install_dmg
• create_macos_vm_install_dmg

However, Apple made some changes to the macOS installer starting in macOS Sierra 10.12.4 which broke the method I was using to build the installers. Recently though, I figured out that I could use Apple’s createinstallmedia tool to help me with building installers for Mac virtual machines again. After a substantial re-write, create_macos_vm_install_dmg is able to create bootable disk images for virtual machines running macOS Sierra, High Sierra and Mojave.

One change from the previous version of the create_macos_vm_install_dmg script is that the resulting installer no longer runs an automated installation. Instead, it will be necessary to follow the prompts to select the language and drive to install the OS onto. For more details, please see below the jump.

Creating macOS installer disk images for VMware Fusion and ESXi with create_macos_vm_install_dmg

I’ve had a tool available for a while named create_vmware_osx_install_dmg, but it looks like it has reached the end of the road with macOS 10.12.3. The reason for this is because macOS 10.12.4 has introduced a change that prevents the addition of third-party packages to the OS installer. create_vmware_osx_install_dmg uses the addition of a third-party installer package, so unfortunately this tool cannot be used to generate 10.12.4 or later OS installers.

That said, I still want to be able to create macOS installer disk images for VMware Fusion and ESXi, so I’ve forked create_vmware_osx_install_dmg into a new script named create_macos_vm_install_dmg. create_macos_vm_install_dmg will generate stock OS installer disk images for the following OS versions:

• Mac OS X 10.7.x
• OS X 10.8.x
• OS X 10.9.x
• OS X 10.10.x
• OS X 10.11.x
• OS X 10.12.x

This script does not use a third-party package, so it is able to build a macOS 10.12.4 installer disk image. For more details, see below the jump.