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

[Ken Cunningham]

All my System Software came from CD’s, DVDs, and machines I own, but I presume some of you know about the munki project and have seen this <https://github.com/munki/macadmin-scripts/blob/main/installinstallmacos.py>.

I have seen other similar scripts that do the same downloading from Apple here and there on the web.


Re: VMs I use Parallels, and have done since at least 2007.

I presently have 10.5 to 11.0 running as VMs on a MacPro 5,1 with much ram and processor horsepower. They scream running off an SSD with 8 processors and 16GB Ram.

All work well, but the 10.5 VM can be a bit touchy with respect to screen output after a few hours; I just log into it through Screen Sharing on the host machine when that happens and it works great. 

PowerPC software runs fine on 10.5 and 10.6 under Rosetta in the VMs.


10.4 Intel does not work through Parallels. I have it working on that same MacPro in Virtual Box, but the most recent update of VirtualBox to 6.1 seemed to break it, so I rolled back to 6.0x while I see what that is about. 

I have 10.4 and 10.5 PPC installed and working through MacPorts qemu-ppc but it’s barely usable as it only supports one processor and it’s not fast.

Ken