macOS guest on v17?

Discussion in 'Parallels Desktop on a Mac with Apple silicon' started by gVirtual, Aug 10, 2021.

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  1. gVirtual

    gVirtual Junior Member

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    It sounds like this is supposed to be possible now, but I can't figure it out.
    Anyone get this set up? Trying to start with Big Sur - so downloaded the Install Big Sur app from the app store. Don't see any way to use it during the VM setup process.
    Anyone successful with this?
     
  2. Elric

    Elric Parallels Team

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    1,718
    Hi,
    macOS Guest on M1 is support only on Macs with macOS Monterey:

    "In collaboration with Apple, Parallels engineers created the World's first prototype of a macOS 12 Monterey virtual machine running on a Mac with the Apple M1 chip. To use this virtual machine, you need a Mac with macOS 12 Monterey or later. Since it is an experimental support for Monterey virtual machines on M1 Macs, please note that productivity and integration features are not available yet."
     
  3. gVirtual

    gVirtual Junior Member

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    Thanks, Eric. I may do this. The blog post describes three approaches but it's not clear how to bootstrap from nothing. Which option works in this case?
     
  4. DonaldG3

    DonaldG3 Bit poster

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    Is it possible/supported to boot the macOS guest to recovery mode, modify Startup Security or SIP options for it?

    (I tried `sudo nvram internet-recovery-mode=RecoveryModeDisk` to no avail, and `sudo nvram internet-recovery-mode=RecoveryModeNetwork` resulted in a prolonged black screen)
     
  5. ErnieS1

    ErnieS1 Junior Member

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    I got it working, but there appear to be some real limitations to the implementation:

    - Allows for only 32GB storage
    - Allows for 4GB RAM
    - Has a locked resolution with no way to adjust
    - Can't be fixed in preferences in case there's a networking issue (there is no preferences, in fact)

    It also appears to use a new format (.macvm, versus the usual .pvm format).

    Any word on when the ability to adjust graphics, RAM and storage settings will be made available?
     
  6. gVirtual

    gVirtual Junior Member

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    How did you do it?
     
  7. ErnieS1

    ErnieS1 Junior Member

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    I installed Monterey.
     
  8. tinbert

    tinbert Bit poster

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    I installed Monterey on a second AFPS volume on my M1 MacBook Air, which was easy. However, when I then try to create a virtual machine based on the Monterey installer app, it will not create the virtual machine. It creates an iso image, but after that Parallels tells me that it can not install Intel-based OS.
    Waiting for an update to 17....

    Bildschirmfoto 2021-08-11 um 16.35.10.png
     
  9. ErnieS1

    ErnieS1 Junior Member

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    12
    Use the "free software" option that it gives you in Monterey. That was the one that works for me. I did not find that loading an ISO worked.
     
  10. Elric

    Elric Parallels Team

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    1,718
    Hi,
    Take a look at https://kb.parallels.com/125561
     
  11. gVirtual

    gVirtual Junior Member

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  12. MikhailT1

    MikhailT1 Member

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    It's not clear from the KB article but assuming Monterey as the host, does that mean Big Sur as a guest won't be possible in the future?
    I assume Monterey is needed because Parallels is using Apple's hypervisor framework and since they don't backport them to previous macOS versions, you have to use the latest macOS version.

    But it is not clear how that impacts macOS versions as guest VMs. Does this have to do with kexts (like GPU) that Apple has to include in macOS versions (and don't backport) to make it run well on Hypervisor?
     
  13. tinbert

    tinbert Bit poster

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    5
    Thx!
    In fact, that runs flawlessly. So I'm virtualising macOS 12 in macOS 12. Well ...
    I hoped that I could run this virtual image on Big Sur, but that was not possible. So for me this is useless :(
     
  14. ErnieS1

    ErnieS1 Junior Member

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    Yeah, I probably wouldn't have upgraded for this, honestly, if I could've done it again. Oh well, at least the Linux support is pretty great!
     
  15. MattD14

    MattD14 Bit poster

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    The Apple virtualization framework that Parallels 17 wraps for MacOS-on-M1 guests doesn't allow you to use a pre-Monterey IPSW archive to seed a MacOS guest, so it's likely that the Apple-provided Big Sur IPSWs are missing some bits or configuration to make that work. It works flawlessly under Monterey b4 though with a Monterey IPSW, so hopefully it'll work for everything new from this point on.
     
    ChrisP27 likes this.
  16. FF_4

    FF_4 Bit poster

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    I just bought a Parallels licence because I have M1 and VMWare doesn't work well on this. Linux guest support works great, but the MacOS... well, let's just say I'm glad I didn't buy it for that. ;) I think it should be more labelled as "early preview" or something.

    What I can do:
    * Create a VM with MacOS but absolutely no customization (although Parallels seems to make it hard to customize before creation even for Linux guests, I have to create a VM and then change it).
    * VM had 16GB RAM and 4 CPUs (my host is 64GB and 10 CPUs so probably about right; I don't know if it adjusts based on host)
    * Launch the MacOS guest, access the network etc.
    * Sound etc. was working, I can see in About my Mac
    * I managed to install Adobe Creative Cloud and launch Lightroom Classic
    Issues:
    * Resolution is fixed (I've deleted it but I think it was like 1440 x 900 or something)
    * Feels very sluggish compared with Linux guests (I'd been using Ubuntu aarch64)
    * Chrome browser is unusable, address bar corrupted along with the top 15-20% of the web page area (all web pages, even Google)
    * Safari is slow and seems to do nothing so I type another address and then some seconds later the original site pops up; otherwise seemed usable. Didn't look into it further to see if it's network related, although downloading Lightroom was fine so if it is network, it's probably DNS
    * Managed to crash the host (only time since I got my new MBP a couple of weeks ago that it's crashed) while exiting full screen
    * Unable to rename the VM from the default "macOS 12" (no option in Parallels, rename on disk and it can't find it)

    If this were usable I'd want to look at remapping some shortcuts, because things like cmd+tab and cmd+space apply to the host (on Linux guests the PC-style shortcuts don't tend to clash as much). I'm not sure if there are some good default alternatives that I needed to discover (slightly random example but Microsoft remote desktop is good for this when connecting from Windows to Windows), or if the user is expected to come up with their own.

    This is a really interesting tech preview and kudos to Parallels and Apple for making it happen. I hope they'll develop it to a production-ready state because it could be quite handy to do some work in a VM that can be restored or wiped afterwards. I also wonder what licence restrictions apply - I understand we're supposed to only run macOS on Apple hardware, but will they let me have a couple of macOS VMs running on my Mac host?
     
  17. Matthew18

    Matthew18 Bit poster

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    Still no macOS VM for M1? This is absurd. I have spent literally spent hours trying to get a Monterey VM to work on an M1 iMac running Monterey with Parallels v17. Despite various of attempts on multiple machines to create acceptable bootable drives, *nothing* works. The closest I get is with a valid installer, but then receive the infuriating error "Failed to create a bootable disk image file for this version of macOS".

    What is it going to take for you guys to get it together? People have been asking for this for over a year and still it doesn't work. I need a VM on this iMac for it to be my primary machine and despite claims that it works on M1 nothing works for me. This is the only reason I'm still hanging on to an Intel Mac.
     
  18. DerekS12

    DerekS12 Bit poster

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    New to Macs and Parallels, but testing out Parallels 17 on M1 MacBook Air the post here https://kb.parallels.com/en/125561 says you can't yet create a VM from a downloaded App Image installer of Monterey, you have to use the provided VM from the Parallels Create New - Free OS options. Mine installed fine, but I'm surprised at the limitations (no resolution changing, no cpu/ram adjustment or any settings adjustments at all for that matter). There's KB articles that explain all this, but I'm finding that out after the fact.
     
  19. TomS34

    TomS34 Bit poster

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    Firstly, big kudos to the Parallels team for the work they do! I support a lot of Parallels users, but rarely get Parallels issues :) anyway...
    When I setup a Monterey VM, I get the VM working, but as stated here, cannot modify anything after that... Which is a shame, because Parallels was awesome for testing DEP in the past. Using the advanced settings, we were able to change the Model and Serial number to emulate a test mac which belonged to our Apple Business Manager account. Even as easy as it is to reset a Monterey mac these days, it's still faster to revert to a previous snapshot.
    @Elric any roadmap info on whether we'll see the "settings" wheel appear to change advanced settings on MacOS VM's?
     
  20. ereward

    ereward Bit poster

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    3
    I have a VM running although it's very slow, the network uses shared and I can see no way of changing it to bridged so the VM can take part in my network properly. Can't even see configuration files in the VM's directory so it's not even possible to make changes there, I moved back to Parallels as they seemed according to the web site they were much more advanced in running VM's on M1 Macs than VMWare but they are not at the moment they are both all but unusable for both Windows and Mac. Luckily I haven't upgraded my MacBook Pro as it's spec is still close to my M1 machine, this means to run Windows or Mac VM's properly I am using a second machine not ideal.
     

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