macos as vm guest

[Ken Cunningham]

> after my development mac mini died (and the time backup appeared to be corrupt) i had to buy another mac. 
> now i have a 2013 imac that can run catalina, but sometimes i also need 10.11 for older hardware and software, and 10.13 for compatibilty with our other macs.
> 
> i would like these 10.11 and 10.13 as vm guest under 10.15.
> 
> which hypervisor should i use (paralells desktop, vmware, virtualbox, other)?
> 
> 
> 
> currently i'm trying parallels desktop 15 on 10.13 with 10.11 guest.
> 
> did a basic install and now on the vm guest in recovery mode run rsync from the original partition to the guest disk.
> 
> is there a better way? parallels has a transporter for windows but not for mac. is there a hidden conversion utility?
> 

I have Parallels running VMs for 10.5 to 10.15 on a 10.14 system. 

Every one works perfectly. Rarely, there is a screen artifact on 10.5, that I fix by logging into it using Screen Sharing (on the same mac running Parallels) and rebooting it.

I have most of them set up as 8 processor 16GB RAM systems, and they scream. I will often run two of them simultaneously building LLVM or Webkit2-gtk to get the older systems working.

I use VirtualBox for 10.4 Intel, as Parallels won't support that. It is not easy with 10.4, but it works.

Ken