Tag: VMware

A note about testing macOS 10.14 and DEP with VMs

Just a quick note if you’re following this method to test Apple’s Device Enrollment Program (DEP) with VMs: as of macOS 10.14.3, the hardware must meet the minimum system requirements for macOS 10.14.

With macOS 10.14.0 through 10.14.2, you were able to use serial numbers from Macs that could not run 10.14.x themselves. Since you’re booting VMs, that didn’t really matter. However, as of 10.14.3, the VM will stall while booting, then eventually reboot and stall again.

It’s unfortunate, as older hardware is easier to find – I had a stack of 2011 Mac minis that I kept specifically for VMs.

Update, 2019-09-03: Erik Gomez corrected me: if you create a VM with vfuse, specify the 2011 Mac mini’s serial number, but use Macmini6,2 instead of Macmini5,1 as hw_model, it’ll boot and let you proceed through DEP. I haven’t tested any other model, but this works great! Thanks, Erik.

New VMware Fusion backup scripts

I’ve overhauled my scripts for backing up VMware Fusion images with Carbon Copy Cloner.  Now, the currently running VMs are paused, backed up, then unpaused.  Pausing/unpausing does not save the contents of the VM’s RAM to disk, so I’ve also added support for suspend/resume.

You can get the updated scripts in my GitHub repository.

Backing up VMware Fusion images

Traditionally, VMware Fusion has not supported using Time Machine to backup your virtual machines. Although this changed with version 4, I’d rather not enable AutoProtect. Instead, I use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup my ‘Virtual Machines’ folder to the root of my Time Machine drive.

Just one catch – if VMware Fusion is open during the copy, eventually CCC will fill up the destination drive, as it’s repeatedly copying data that’s in use. The solution? A preflight script that checks for the VMware Fusion process, and aborts the backup if the program is currently running.

The scripts are available in my GitHub repository.

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