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In the PC World, there many cool migration tools to convert a live, physical and running Windows machine into a VM (Virtual Machine) guests. I have migrated quite a few using VMware's own migration tool and they work great. Converting Linux and OSX isn't so easy. OSX makes it much more difficult but it is not impossible. I plan to convert some Apple Xserves into VMs and consolidate them into a few running ESXi 5.

1. Download Vmware For Mac

That will be a later post as I am getting my feet wet; figuring this out and sharing it to those interested. This tutorial will use VMware Fusion 5. You will need Fusion 5. It doesn't cost much and apparently the licensing allows you to install on 3 macs which is way cool.

Download Vmware For Mac

I have switched completely over to VMware Fusion 5 from Parallells and VirtualBox on the Mac platform. It makes it easier to convert a VMware machine build into something I can import into ESXi.

The difference between Parallels, I won't go into here but so far, I am digging Fusion. I really like the fast suspend. To Clone a Physical Mac there are a few things you need to consider. 1)Is it legal? Well, Servers from 10.5 can be virtualized. Workstation/Desktop (non-server) OSX 10.7 and 10.8 can be virtualized. For my use case, yes, I am completely legal.

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I am converting a 10.6.2 Snow Leopard server. I'll even try as far back as 10.5 if any of those still exists in my inventory. There are back-door step (changing a plist file) to virtualize 10.5 and 10.6 non-server but I won't go there. 2) You need to build a base OS build from scratch to act as your Cloning 'middleman.'

This should be a minimal Mac OS X VM guest build just big enough to run something like Carbon Cloner 3) You should have a spare USB drive or network share to store your 'cloned disk images.' How To Convert a Physical Macintosh into a VMware VM Virtual Machine. It is a multi-step process so I will outline how I successfully converted a few Macs. Clone your Physical machine using your cloning tool of choice. CarbonCloner is the most popular.

Clone it to a Sparse Disk Image. It makes it easier to transport and store multiple clones. Do not try to clone to a drive and use it as your source. It will probably be a waste of disk storage and you wont be able to boot from it in your VM. Stick to creating DMG images you can clone to.

I won't go into details how you do this but there are probably hundreds of tutorials on cloning your mac on the internet. If you are a mac IT pro reading this post, it is most likely you've already done this.

Step 2. Build your 'middleman' OSX build. Here, you have to actually install a full running OSX that runs inside Fusion 5. Trust me, it is pretty easy unlike various hack attempts in the past. No pseudo hackintosh in a VM or special CD-ROM iso boot disk.

It is a straight install as if you are installing on to a real Mac. I chose something simple. I did a quick install of 10.7. You can even install from a DMG. I believe I used the ESDInstall extracted from the app store download. The whole process took 20 minutes on my setup and the size was around 12 GB for a virgin system. I simply stored my build on an external drive that I can shuttle around.

But they are actually clickable input fields. This is my pet peeve. It shows a lack of UI (User Interface) understanding in the most fundamental way in regards to how applications should be designed. The gist of this section is, you have to change the OS device label to the updates guest should be running.

My original build was 10.7 and now, I had to now change it to 10.6 so I can boot into a 10.6 build. To boot back to my middleman OSX, I would have to go back and change the OS device label back to 10.7. So far I have a few Macs virtualized and I will undergo some testing before I embark on building out an ESXi 5 build on a physical 12 core XServe which will host these new Mac guests.

There you have. Hopefully this will help some people looking to virtualize their macs. Extra Credit for Mac IT guys: And a little extra tidbit of info. If you are looking to doing this as a failover precaution due to the fact Xserves are no longer being sold, you can do scheduled nightly clones from a live running real mac. In essence,have a VM guest that is continually synchronizing with a live mac in the event the live mac fails and the VM guest can take over.

This is my style of ghetto IT that works: You would need to set up two Carbon Copy schedulers. One on your live Mac and one on your middleman VM mac. Either your live mac or VM Mac would need to share out a volume or have both access a shared network storage. The Live Mac would backup nightly to a sparse image on the shared network volume. Then schedule the middleman mac to clone from that nightly backup to your new VM second drive. You would need to schedule them apart to let the live mac to finish it's clone. Usually it should be quick because Carbon Cloner doesn't do a full clone on subsequent clones.

It only copies the incremental. You can also use SuperDuper, Chronosync or old fashion rsync. With rsync, you just need to add the -E flag to copy extended attributes. I would personally run a cron job with rsync every hour to get at least an hour of synchronized data.

So in the event your Xserve (or other Mac server) physically dies, you should have a fairly up-to-date VM guest ready to be fired up and run while you go ebaying for a replacement Xserve or buy a new Mac Pro. Yes, that could be a problem with OD if you did a hot clone (clone while the machine is running). The OD database doesn't like to be touched/copied while it is running. You should turn off the service if you are doing a hot clone. The best way is to d a cold clone.

For cold cloning, You may have to do a target disk and clone with another machine, boot off another boot disk and clone that way, or take the drive out and clone on another machine. For OpenDirectory, there are also a bunch of scripts online I've seen (afp548) that backs up the OD database and allows restore on another machine. Basically, you have to disable the service so it is running, export the user/password database, restart back the service. You may want to try to do a backup/restore of the OD before trying to do another clone.

Great tutorial! Thanks for posting this, it's exactly what I was looking for. That label being clickable completely eluded me until I read your article. I've seen that 'CPU has been disabled' message and figured that was just the end of the line. I've spent several hours trying figure out how to set the CPU id mask in the.vmx file, etc. Thank you so much!

In my particular circumstance I'm going to (just for fun) see if I can virtualize a Mac mini that we've been using to run DeployStudio.:) Curious, did you ever get any of your Mac VMs running on ESXi 5? PS: Really love the Extra Credit for I/T Guys tip, great idea, thanks! Loved your post. So much so, I attempted to virtualize a Mavericks Server into Fusion Pro 7.0.1 but hit two major roadblocks (perhaps connected). First, the host name got wiped out & reset to 'localhost' in the VM.

Is that expected? Second, the certificate I had installed seems to be causing all kinds of SSL problems for apache (Init: pass phrase incorrect, etc.). Any ideas what I could do differently such that the hostname, the Computer Name, and the certificate would survive virtualization? Anonymous Thanks a lot for this info. I could never have guessed every step here. I got stuck on Step 5 when trying to access the sparse image via VMWare's shared folders. With CCC or Disk Utility or even trying to mount it in the Finder, I'd get 'no mountable file system' errors or similar.

Finally I found this info at the CCC page: That gave me the idea to connect from VMWare to my Mac using AFP on the LAN. When I did that, I was able to access the sparse image with CCC.