How to Run macOS Catalina VM in VMware Player Software

How to Run macOS Catalina VM in VMware Player Software

Apple’s MacBook series attract most users. The common idea of ​​users who have an iPhone, iPad, or other devices unite in the view that the Apple ecosystem is something that needs to be experienced.

Today's technology devices cannot meet each user easily due to the manufacturers' price policies. When it comes to Apple and its ecosystem, the initial price for users to experience the macOS operating system is 1,000$ at its best.

If this is the case, we can not get the device, but can we try the system somehow? The question comes to mind. Our answer to this question is YES!

Let's start to have the macOS experience with the macOS Catalina installation guide on our Intel processor desktop or laptop.

NOTE: The virtual machine setup has not been tested on a system with an AMD processor. We will update our guide when tested.

Let's start our guide with the system requirements you need to use macOS Catalina.

Hardware requirements:

- Intel processor that supports virtualization feature. You can search and learn your processor's virtualization technology support through the link here. If your processor supports virtualization technology, remember to enable this setting in the BIOS.

- Windows 10 64-Bit version installed on your system.

- Minimum 8 GB of RAM and at least 60 GB of free disk space for the virtual computer to work comfortably.

Step 1

First, we install the VMware Workstation Player 15 version that we downloaded from the link above to our Windows 10 computer.

If you want to install advanced keyboard support during the installation step, select the Enhanced Keyboard Driver option and include it in the installation.

After finishing the installation, proceed to the next step without opening VMware Workstation Player.

Step 2

VMware Workstation Player does not support the installation of macOS operating systems by default. To install our virtual machine, we need to install the VMware Unlocker program, which you can download from the links above.

Extract the downloaded unlocker-210.rar file to the desktop. You must run the win-install.bat file as an administrator in the file you extracted.

Step 3

When you came to this step, VMware Workstation now virtually supports Apple's macOS Catalina operating system installation. Now it's time to set up our virtual machine.

When you open VMware Workstation Player, let's choose the Create a New Virtual Machine option and take our first step.

The program will ask us to show us the path of the ISO file of the system we want to install, but we will show the installation file after we make the settings of our virtual machine. So we choose I will install the operating system later and go to the next step.

Since we have not yet shown our installation file to the virtual machine, he wants us to manually enter the system information to be installed. If you made the settings we applied in step 2 correctly, you will see the Apple Mac OS X option in the settings we will enter manually. We select this option and select macOS 10.14 in the Version section and continue.

We specify the name that we want to put in our virtual machine and where you want the files of that virtual machine to be located.

Our next setting is to assign disk space to our virtual operating system. We select the area where the virtual machine should work comfortably as 100 GB. If you do not have 100 GB of free space, we recommend that you assign at least 60 GB of free space.

In the option below, we finish the process of creating a virtual machine by selecting the Store virtual disk as a single file option and pressing Next to keep our virtual machine files in a single file.

Step 4

There are currently two missing points in our virtual machine we created. The first is the hardware settings of the virtual machine, and the second is the macOS Catalina ISO file that we need to show to our machine for system setup. Let's fix our first shortcoming.

When you open VMware Player, we select the virtual machine we created in the previous step, press Edit virtual machine settings, and open the settings.

We will select the amount of RAM that our virtual machine will use like half of the total amount of RAM in your system. 8 GB RAM is installed in our machine, we choose 4 GB RAM.

After our memory setting, we need to adjust the processor usage of our virtual machine. At this point, there is a situation we need to pay attention to. First of all, we need to assign the cores of the processor we use. Our tuning here will be half of the system hardware we use in-memory tuning for high performance. We select the four cores from the list on the right for the machine to use.

Here, we must also enable the virtualization setting of our processor that we have enabled from the BIOS screen for VMware in this step. We also tick the Virtualize Intel VT-x option.

In the CD / DVD section, we specify the path of the downloaded macOS Catalina ISO file.

We enable the USB 3.0 port so that our machine can detect USB devices correctly.

Step 5

In this step, we need to prevent an error that may be encountered while installing the macOS operating system in VMware Workstation Player. To prevent this problem or solve it, we need to add a command inside your VMX file.

Right-click the file with the VMX extension in the folder where you installed your virtual machine and click open with.

Select the notepad or similar application from the Open with box and open the file. Add smc.version = “0” to the top or bottom line after opening the file and save and close the file.

Step 6

Yes, finally all the settings are finished and we can proceed to the installation of macOS Catalina on our virtual machine.

Important note: If you update VMware Workstation Player, you need to repeat Step 2.

We are launching our virtual machine, and we come across the macOS Catalina setup screen. In this screen, we need to convert the disk space we allocate for the virtual machine to the file format used by macOS. For this, we choose Disk Utility.

The disk that we have reserved in Disk Utility appears as VMware Virtual SATA Hard Drive Media in the left menu. While this disk is selected, we press the Erase option just above. In this section, we write a new name for this disk, select the disk format as Mac OS Extended (Journaled), and press Erase.

After erasing and formatting the disk, we can load the system to disk with Install macOS in the previous menu.

When we choose to install, the installation of macOS Catalina will start on our virtual machine. The duration of this operation may vary depending on the hardware setup you have set for the virtual machine.

After the installation is finished, the virtual machine will automatically reboot.

When the installation of macOS Catalina is finished, turn off your virtual machine power. Now we need to extract the ISO file we showed to the virtual machine in step 4.

To do this, open the virtual machine settings. Untick the Connect at power on the option under Device Status in the CD / DVD settings and save the settings.

Step 7

Now that we have extracted our ISO file, we can start our virtual machine. When the system starts, it welcomes us with a welcome screen. From this screen, you can make all your customizations such as language, time, clock, keyboard, iCloud settings.

Step 8

We have made high-performance hardware settings for macOS Catalina that we will use with VMware Workstation. However, we need to install VMware Tools, which is among the programs required for macOS to provide higher performance as a system, to our virtual machine.

First we open Player> Removable Devices> CD / DVD (SATA)> Settings from the top left of the screen.

In the window that opens, we show the VMwareTools ISO file that we downloaded from the Use ISO image file section, then mark and save the Connected option.

After these processes, we will see the ISO file in our macOS virtual system. We double click the disk and run it. We start the installation with Install VMware Tools from the window that opens.

After this process, the installation of macOS Catalina 10.15 on the virtual machine on Windows 10 is completed successfully.

You can now use both Windows 10 and macOS Catalina on a single computer. We wish everyone a nice experience using macOS with VMware Catalina installation guide.

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