Below I’ll outline some of the considerations. I asked peers on Twitter for their experiences using these technologies. While image-based solutions are intriguing, there’s a performance and complexity overhead when using virtualization, especially with macOS, which wasn’t made to be virtualized. VMware vSphere is the oldest available solution, whereas Anka (2017) and Orka (2019) are newer technologies. It is possible to install macOS with open source solutions such as KVM, but this requires a lot of dedication and - if you factor in time - it’s likely more expensive than commercial solutions. When it comes to macOS virtualization, there are three commercial solutions available on the market: This article is part of a series about Continuous Integration for Small iOS/macOS Teams. It also officially stipulates that renting software is allowed, just in time for Amazon to enter the space with its new EC2 Mac instances. With the release of Big Sur, Apple changed the license to double down on the macOS hardware requirement. This restriction, combined with the fact that Apple doesn’t offer server hardware, increases costs and makes running macOS more expensive and challenging. This is not a technical limitation - macOS runs perfectly fine in virtualization on standard PC hardware - but rather a restriction in Apple’s EULA.

Running macOS - even virtualized - requires macOS hardware. There’s a reason why build minutes are more expensive on continuous integration (CI) services when it comes to macOS: Macs are notoriously difficult to use via CI.

Mac os virtualization