Once at this screen select the “Virtual Machine” menu and attach the USB device containing the bootable Mountain Lion OS.

Wait for this screen to disappear showing a black screen that end with “Shell>”. Customize the Virtual Machine as desired and then click “Finish.” This will bring up a gray screen that will show erros when readon the SCSI Harddrive and CDROM then continue on to the Network boot. If installing via a Bootable USB is not needed, and the software in question has already been obtained, you may skip to the creation steps for each Virtualization Application, VMWare, Parallels, or VirtualBox Obtaining Software Mac OS X Mountain Lionįrom the “+” Dropdown Menu select “New” followed by “Continue without disc.” Next choose “Create a custom virtual machine” and define what OS and Version one is installing. The only install that is guaranteed is App/Disk Image) (Note: not every Virtualization Application offers each creation scheme. A Bootable USB installation would ensure that a backup of the OS X Disk Image is made as well as less disk space being used as the Disk Image and/or App is no longer required to be kept on the Host machine but requires a USB Drive of at least 5 GB to create a said Bootable USB. The Recovery Partition option requires no extra download (up-front) but can take longer and requires an internet connection to verify the OS install with Apple as well as a re-download of the OS itself that will be placed on the Virtual Machine. An App or Disk image installation is the easiest of the installation options but requires the space for the OS X Disk Image.

Each can be classified as “App or Disk Image”, “Recovery Partition”, “Bootable USB”. There a various ways to create a Virtual Machine using the virtualizing applications. I will outline every step I took to ensure a fully functioning install of a virtual machine using OS X Mountain Lion, VMWare, Parallels, and VirtualBox (Currently there’s an issue with Mac OS X Mountain Lion and VirtualBox with regards to a hypervisor). There are many tutorials out there describing the process, but many are short, incomplete, and out of date. While this is most commonly managed by the IT department via their delegation of certain machines as a Dev, QA, and even Stage environments, the same concept may be easily applied to a developer’s own cycle through the use of a local Virtual Machine.Īs I’ve begun my foray into the world of Mac and iOS development the first task I’ve taken on is the setup of my personal Mac OS X virtual machine. One key aspect of development is being able to test code, but more importantly testing code in a controlled environment.

Mac os x vmware usb drive