Is there any legal way to virtualize macOS on other hardware?

The widely held consensus is that it is only legal to run virtual copies of macOS on a genuine Apple made Apple Mac computer.

There are numerous packages to do this but as above they all have to be done on a genuine Apple Mac.

1. VMware Fusion - this allows creating VMs that run as windows within a normal Mac environment. You can therefore have a virtual Mac running inside a Mac. This is useful to either run simultaneously different versions of macOS or to run a test environment inside your production environment. A lot of people are going to use this approach to run an older version of macOS which supports 32bit apps as macOS Catalina will not support old 32bit apps.
2. VMware ESXi aka vSphere - this is a different approach known as a 'bare metal' approach. With this you use a special VMware environment and then inside that create and run virtual machines. So on a Mac you could create one or more virtual Mac but these would run inside ESXi and not inside a Mac environment. It is more commonly used in enterprise situations and hence less applicable to Mac users.
3. Parallels Desktop - this works in the same way as VMware Fusion but is written by Parallels instead.
4. VirtualBox - this works in the same way as VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop. Unlike those it is free of charge. Ostensible it is 'owned' by Oracle. It works but at least with regards to running virtual copies of macOS is still vastly inferior to VMware Fusion and Parallels Desktop. (You get what you pay for.)

Last time I checked Apple's terms you could do the following.

1. Run a virtualised copy of macOS on a genuine Apple made Mac for the purposes of doing software development
2. Run a virtualised copy of macOS on a genuine Apple made Mac for the purposes of testing
3. Run a virtualised copy of macOS on a genuine Apple made Mac for the purposes of being a server
4. Run a virtualised copy of macOS on a genuine Apple made Mac for personal non-commercial use

By omission the conclusion is that if you are business you cannot run a virtualised copy to run say an old version of Adobe Creative Suite or Microsoft Office. You should instead as a business upgrade those apps.

See - https://www.apple.com/legal/sla/docs/macOS1014.pdf

No. Apple spells this out very clearly in the License Agreement for macOS. Must be installed on Apple branded hardware.

Apple branded hardware means any computers made by Apple.

Just to add, if I remember correctly, most VM applications are designed not to allow Mac guests on other platforms.

yuliyap wrote:

- should we use only real Macs for testing?

Yes.