Can't Upgrade MacOS Guest VM because of lack of disk space.

Hi Folks,

Trying to figure out how to upgrade MacOS on my guest VMs. It says I need an extra 6gb of space freed up to do the upgrade from 13.4 to 14.3. I would really like to avoid having to recreate all of these VMs from scratch with a larger virtual drive (I'm aware that's an option).

So far I have tried:
- Creating an empty disk image and moving the installer there (installer is like 13 gigs). That didn't work because the disk image still lives on the main VM drive so still takes up space.
- Moved the installer to my host machine and tried opening it from there. This frees up enough space, but the installer won't run on the VM when it's stored on the host machine.

Any ideas? It appears there is no way to increase the size of the virtual drive on the VM after its already been created, though if that's possible, I'd love to do that to avoid this issue in the future. Thanks in advance.

 

If anybody else is struggling with this, I found a solution:

1. On the host machine, create a new disk image (15 GB should be fine)
2. Mount the new disk image. Create a new folder in the disk image, then copy the Sonoma installer into it. (for some reason, if I copied the Sonoma installer directly into the disk image root, it wouldn't "stick". If you unmount and remount the image, the installer would not be there).
3. Place the disk image in a shared space that you can access from the VM.
4. From the VM, mount the disk image and run the installer.

This allows you to run the installer, without actually having it consume space on the VM virtual drive, and in my case, allowed for enough free space to run the upgrade.

FWIW. the upgrade is running right now. it hasn't completed yet. If it fails for some reason I'll provide an update here.

 

Upgrade completed successfully on all 4 of my VMs