El Capitan Installed in VMWare / Win 8.1 Host - Working, easy

[JVene]

I see a number of people posting about El Capitan, various issues - here I have an anecdotal account to offer that it can work very well.

 

Host is Win 8.1, VMWare Workstation 12 pro, Unlocker 2.0x (whatever latest that worked on Workstation 11 had no problem).

 

I've had OS X in versions from Tiger through Yosemite. At this point the El Capitan VM is the best of them, in that the installation went flawlessly, sound works without chopping up (I mean, you can watch video, listen to music...just like any other VM), USB works (required a touchup) - iPod Touch/iPhone connects to iTunes & XCode, 8 logical cores (from an I7 quad with HT on), Networking, Fit Guest resolution, VMWare shared folders, etc.

 

Here's the basics of what I did (really straight forward, best I've experienced thus far).

 

I downloaded the El Capitan update in my Yosemite VM. I then followed widely available instructions for creating a bootable installer from that (in my case, I put that on a VMDK - a virtual HD, but I could have elected a USB stick). 

 

Then, I created a new VM in Workstation, all basic options (with OS X 10.11 as the OS in the dropdown thanks to unlocked).

 

I created a new HD for the new VM, then added the existing VMDK of the bootable image - then booted the VM.

 

That failed....simply added the widely documented "smc.version="0"" to the VMX file...booted without incident.

 

The Install ran without issue (clean install). No use of Chameleon, Clover or other boot loader - just straight VMWare UEFI. 

 

I have a copy of recent VMWARE FUSION, from which I pulled darwin.iso which has the newest VMWare tools.

 

Attached that as an ISO to VMWARE, ran the installer...rebooted, flawless....except

 

Once booted, USB did not work. I removed all usb_xhci entries in the VMX file (so the usb entries were like those of my working Yosemite)...setting USB compatibility to 2.0 (not 3.0). That made USB work for iPod touch/iPhone in Xcode and iTunes.

 

After that, so far as I can tell, it's the best OS X VM I've used. Xcode 7.1 installed without issue (I put 6.4 in too). I built and ran iOS samples with OpenGLES2/3 3D animation without issue in the simulator, and on the device.

 

VMWare's "Fit Guest" works fine...I can even stretch the VM over 3 monitors - but it does not (and never did in OS X) recognize multiple monitors the way other VM's of Linux/Windows do.

 

Shared folders work, too.