Possible to run Snow Leopard in a VM?

[cnstoll]

Hey guys,

I'm excited about Lion but I have a small problem. I would like to still be able to play Starcraft and Diablo 2 from time to time, which will no longer be possible because they require carbon to run.

One solution I thought of was just keeping a version of 10.6 in a VM with either Parallels or VMWare Fusion to play them. Since they are fairly old games I am confident the performance overhead of a VM will not greatly affect them.

So, my question is, is it possible to install an older version of Mac OS X in VMWare Fusion or Parallels?

Thanks

 

[labaom]

I really don't see the point in upgrading to Lion if there are no good features.

 

[Dhelsdon]

I don't see why you couldn't.. might have some issues with setting up drivers though.

 

[mrapplegate]

So, my question is, is it possible to install an older version of Mac OS X in VMWare Fusion or Parallels?

Thanks

Yes. Or just keep a SL partition and run both.

 

[cnstoll]

I really don't see the point in upgrading to Lion if there are no good features.

Yeah that really didn't provide any useful information at all.

Thanks to others that posted. I'll probably try a VM first or otherwise just keep a SL partition.

 

[mdnz]

The Snow Leopard license doesn't allow that, thus it won't work in either Parallels or Fusion (without some hacks).

You can only use Snow Leopard server to legally virtualise Snow Leopard.

 

[mrapplegate]

The Snow Leopard license doesn't allow that, thus it won't work in either Parallels or Fusion (without some hacks).

You can only use Snow Leopard server to legally virtualise Snow Leopard.

My bad, good catch mdnz, for some reason I thought it ran in VirtualBox. Minus the legal issues.

 

[Steve.P.JobsFan]

The Snow Leopard license doesn't allow that, thus it won't work in either Parallels or Fusion (without some hacks).

You can only use Snow Leopard server to legally virtualise Snow Leopard.

Really? I have Snow Leopard running in Virtualbox just fine. All you have to do is Select OS X Server in the VirtualBox window, slap in your SL DVD, and it works just fine.

 

[mdnz]

Really? I have Snow Leopard running in Virtualbox just fine. All you have to do is Select OS X Server in the VirtualBox window, slap in your SL DVD, and it works just fine.

I didn't say it doesn't work, I said that it is against the Snow Leopard license to do so.

 

[Madd the Sane]

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Unless there are custom Mac OS X drivers, I wouldn't be surprised if there was no OpenGL acceleration under a VM.

 

[hehe299792458]

I didn't say it doesn't work, I said that it is against the Snow Leopard license to do so.

Hmm... It didn't work for me - just sticking in the SL DVD and trying to install it in VMware

 

[mdnz]

Hmm... It didn't work for me - just sticking in the SL DVD and trying to install it in VMware

Read my previous post... it's against the license to do so unless you apply some hacks. That's why VMWare won't boot a normal Snow Leo DVD without those hacks.

 

[kasakka]

Why not just run Windows in VMWare? Would probably handle those games better.

 

[maflynn]

Its against the EULA to run 10.6 in a VM and vmware only will allow you to run OSX server (not the desktop osx). With that said, you can visit insanelymac which there are discussions in doing this.

 

[dbam987]

OS X Lion allows running additional OS X instances (presumably of the Lion variety) as virtual machines using VMWare/Parallels.

http://osxdaily.com/2011/07/02/mac-...onal-os-x-instances-within-a-virtual-machine/

Wondering if I could take one of those images and run them virtually on a Windows host though. I bet that's against the EULA, but has anyone with one of the developer previews of Lion tried this anyway?