FYI -- Parallels 16 now supports BigSur as a VM on older systems

[Christopher Nielsen]

> On 2020-12-06-S, at 21:26, Ryan Schmidt <ryandesign at macports.org> wrote:
> 
> On Dec 6, 2020, at 20:21, Michael wrote:
> 
>> Ok, lets say I wanted to use a 2014 laptop running 10.9.5 as the host -- which VM would let me run a 10.12 and a 10.14 guest? 
>> 
>> Bonus points if it can run a 10.7 (lion) guest.
> 
> Well your options are VMware Fusion, Parallels Desktop and VirtualBox. Since the last of those is free, maybe start there. If it doesn't work, try one of the other two. If the host OS is to be 10.9, which is old, then you may need an older version of any of these.
> 
>> Triple bonus if it can run either a PPC guest, or a 10.6 running rosetta :-)
>> (That's *NOT* a joke, some software never updated.)
> 
> *Virtualization* software won't run a PowerPC guest on an Intel host. *Emulation* software would.

Yeah, you’d definitely need a much older version of any of those products. VirtualBox might be good place to start.

That said, QEMU (or a derivative) could also be a option… particularly if you need to emulate a PowerPC guest.