How to Install & Run macOS Mojave Beta in a Virtual Machine the Easy Way

You can easily install and run macOS Mojave beta in a virtual machine right now on a Mac, and the process is surprisingly easy, plus it’s free!

This tutorial will walk you through the steps required to install macOS Mojave beta into a virtual machine environment using freely available software. It’s quite easy, so even if you have never used a virtual machine before you should be able to get it all working by following the instructions as written.

For some quick background, virtualization essentially means you can have a self-contained instance of macOS Mojave running in an application layer atop your primary version of Mac OS system software, allowing to run and test macOS Mojave in a virtual machine (VM) without committing to a complete system update. Because the VM is self contained, it won’t have access to your files or normal data, but it will have internet access and be a completely functional installation of Mojave in the virtual environment. In this case the virtualization software we’re going to use to accomplish this is the excellent Parallels Desktop Lite app, which is the free version of the equally excellent Parallels app.

Requirements: Before getting started, you will need to meet the following requirements; you must have an active internet connection, the host Mac must be compatible with macOS Mojave, you will need to download the free Parallels Desktop Lite app, you will need to download the macOS Mojave installer (currently in beta, meaning you will need to enroll in the public beta to get access to the installer), and you’ll need about 30 GB of free disk space available to get this working all working not including the space required to download the macOS Mojave installer app or Parallels Desktop.

How to Install macOS Mojave in a Virtual Machine with Parallels Lite

1. Get Parallels Desktop Lite free from the Mac App Store
2. Next, download the macOS Mojave beta installer from the Mac App Store to the Mac – when the download completes be sure to quit out of the Mojave installer and do not install it
3. Launch “Parallels Desktop Lite” from the /Applications/ folder in Mac OS
4. At the ‘Installation Assistant’ screen, choose “Install Windows or another OS from a DVD or image file” then continue



5. Parallels Lite will locate any macOS Installer applications found on the Mac, choose “Install macOS Mojave beta.app” from the list shown and then click Continue



6. Confirm that you want to create a bootable disk image file by clicking Continue



7. At the ‘Name and Location’ screen, name the virtual machine something obvious like ‘macOS Mojave’ and optionally change the destination location of the Parallels image file (this will be the large file that contains the entire virtual machine and installation of Mojave), then click Create



8. Wait a few moments and the virtual machine will begin booting



9. Choose your language at the language setting screen



10. At the ‘macOS Utilities’ screen choose “Install macOS” to begin the process of installing Mojave into the VM



11. Click ‘Continue’ and agree to the MacOS Mojave terms of license agreement



12. Choose the virtual drive to install macOS Mojave onto (typically labeled as ‘Macintosh HD’) then click “Install”



13. The installation process for macOS Mojave into the Parallels virtual machine will begin
14. The VM will reboot in a moment or two and you’ll eventually see the familiar  Apple logo with an “Installing” indicator and a guesstimate on when the installation will complete, let this process run



15. When installation is complete you’ll see the “Welcome” and setup screens for macOS, choose your country location and click Continue



16. Create the account for the VM with macOS Mojave and continue



17. Choose other simple configuration and setup options as you continue through the Mojave setup process, including whether to use light theme or dark theme



18. When complete, a fully functioning macOS Mojave installation will boot and be running inside the Parallels Desktop Lite app



19. You’ll likely want to update macOS Mojave after completing installation, do this by going to  Apple menu > System Preferences > Software Update and installing any available updates to Mojave

That’s it, you’re now running a complete installation of macOS Mojave inside the Parallels virtual machine, have fun! You can explore all the new features and changes in macOS Mojave, including changing between Dark Mode and Light Mode themes, checking out Dynamic Desktops, desktop Stacks, explore changes to the Finder and Software Update mechanism, investigate the apps new to macOS Mojave like Stocks and Voice Memos, and whatever else you want. It’s a complete clean installation of macOS Mojave in a virtual machine.

Quitting out of the macOS Mojave Virtual Machine

Because MacOS Mojave is running entirely in the virtual machine environment, you can quit and open the entire instance like any other application, just pull down the application menu and choose “Quit” to quit out of Mojave.

Opening and Resuming macOS Mojave Virtual Machine

To relaunch macOS Mojave, open “Parallels Desktop Lite” from the Applications folder to start the Mojave virtual machine again, it can resume immediately where you left off last.

This offers a great way to test out macOS Mojave without committing to the full installation and update on a primary Mac. Maybe you want to give it a test run and see how you like it, or test compatibility with particular apps, or to give Dark Theme Mode or Stacks a closer look,

Any Mac that is capable of running Parallels Desktop Lite and any Mac compatible with macOS Mojave should be able to get this working, but performance will be better on machines with more hardware resources, so the more RAM and the faster the CPU and hard disk, the better the experience will be. It’s not going to perform as well as a native installation, that’s just the nature of virtualization and virtual machines, but that’s a small inconvenience when compared to the usefulness of using a VM.

By the way if you got a kick out of this, you’d almost certainly enjoy browsing through our other articles about virtual machines. In a similar manner, you can run Windows 10 on a Mac in a virtual machine for free, or run Ubuntu Linux in a VM, Sierra, Snow Leopard, or even Windows 95, or so much more. Virtual machines are a fun world to explore and widely used for testing, administration, development, among countless other environments used by many industry professionals throughout the IT world.

This approach with Parallels really should be the simplest method available to install and run MacOS Mojave in a VM. If you’ve spent any time looking into this before you may notice that many of the guides for virtualizing macOS aresuggest that to install or run macOS Mojave in a virtual machine requires modifying tons of settings and configuration files in order to get macOS Mojave to load in VirtualBox or VMWare, but none of that is necessary if you simply use Parallels Desktop Lite, which is a free download from the Mac App Store.

* You can also install and run macOS High Sierra or macOS Sierra in a virtual machine this way, but we’re obviously focusing on macOS Mojave here. Parallel

Happy virtualizing of macOS Mojave! Do remember that the virtual machine is going to take up a pretty sizable amount of disk space, so if you do this just for fun and decide you don’t care to use it again, don’t forget to delete the Mojave virtual machine from the location you created in at (in step 7) to recover the 30GB or so of disk space from the Mac. You can also delete the Mojave virtual machine from the Parallels Desktop Lite app too.

Are you running macOS Mojave in a virtual machine? What do you think? Let us know your experiences and comments below!