MacOS – Is it possible to run Mountain Lion on older hardware by using a virtualization solution

macmacosvirtualization

I'm wondering if anyone has gotten Mountain Lion to run on any hardware in virtualization (VMware Fusion, Parallels, VirtualBox or other…). If so, it would be interesting to know how well (if at all) attempting to run the 10.8 OS on Mac hardware that normally wouldn't allow an installation of the OS.

Has anyone taken a Mountain Lion VM and run it on older hardware?

Best Answer

10.7.x or 10.8 (Build 12A269) in VirtualBox

There's an answer under How can I install Mac OS X Lion in VirtualBox, or any other type of virtual machine?.

I guess, a .vdi of Mountain Lion produced in that way will be usable with at least some Macs that might not otherwise run the OS.

Example

Physical machine:

  • MacBookPro5,2 with 8 GB memory
  • VirtualBox 4.2.0 Beta 1.

In the VirtualBoxVM:

  • Build 12A269 of OS X 10.8
  • without FileVault 2
  • with Core Storage encryption of something other than the startup volume
  • dynamic_pager disabled:

a screenshot of OS X 10.8 in VirtualBox with dynamic_pager disabled

Alongside an answer to Why would I disable swap file in Mac OS X?, note that without swap files, Activity Monitor measures both:

  • virtual memory size
  • page ins.
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