Mac OS Virtualization on Windows Server

[Nathaniel.Belles]

Hey guys,

I have had some Dell Poweredge 2950 servers for a while and have finally gotten around to working on them. On LinusTechTips youtube page they do a lot of computer virtualization and such and I do a lot of video editing on my macbook pro. I want to use my servers to virtualize Mac OS X so that I can use some of the processing power to help transcode some of my videos that I edit. I was just curious if anyone has had any luck or if they have even tried to run Mac OS X within Windows and may have some suggestions or potentially some place to look to get more information on it.

 

At one point a while back I was able to get it running but the cpu was maxed out within the mac virtual machine and then was maxing out the server that was running it too. The graphics were horribly slow (which was probably attributed to the lack of graphics processing power in the poweredge server) but I'm not sure if the reason it was so slow was purely a visual problem (and that it was actually running normally but the bad graphics were making it seem slow) or if it was actually really slow. 

 

Any ideas on the topic would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[brwainer]

7 hours ago, Nathaniel.Belles said:

Hey guys,

I have had some Dell Poweredge 2950 servers for a while and have finally gotten around to working on them. On LinusTechTips youtube page they do a lot of computer virtualization and such and I do a lot of video editing on my macbook pro. I want to use my servers to virtualize Mac OS X so that I can use some of the processing power to help transcode some of my videos that I edit. I was just curious if anyone has had any luck or if they have even tried to run Mac OS X within Windows and may have some suggestions or potentially some place to look to get more information on it.

 

At one point a while back I was able to get it running but the cpu was maxed out within the mac virtual machine and then was maxing out the server that was running it too. The graphics were horribly slow (which was probably attributed to the lack of graphics processing power in the poweredge server) but I'm not sure if the reason it was so slow was purely a visual problem (and that it was actually running normally but the bad graphics were making it seem slow) or if it was actually really slow. 

 

Any ideas on the topic would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I've looked into this a few times. You can't do it with Hyper-V server, but I'm pretty sure you can do it using VMWare or VirtualBox. Basically you have to follow instructions for running OSX on Windows, and ignore the fact that you have Windwos Sevrer and could be using Hyper-V. Also remember that you can only have one Hypervisor installed at once.

[Blake]

On 3/13/2016 at 2:03 PM, brwainer said:

Also remember that you can only have one Hypervisor installed at once.

unless your running esxi, then you can virtulise other esxi/hyper-v/kvm instances

 

Apart from whiteboxing, there'd be no point...

[F4S4K4N]

On 3/11/2016 at 4:01 PM, Nathaniel.Belles said:

Hey guys,

I have had some Dell Poweredge 2950 servers for a while and have finally gotten around to working on them. On LinusTechTips youtube page they do a lot of computer virtualization and such and I do a lot of video editing on my macbook pro. I want to use my servers to virtualize Mac OS X so that I can use some of the processing power to help transcode some of my videos that I edit. I was just curious if anyone has had any luck or if they have even tried to run Mac OS X within Windows and may have some suggestions or potentially some place to look to get more information on it.

 

At one point a while back I was able to get it running but the cpu was maxed out within the mac virtual machine and then was maxing out the server that was running it too. The graphics were horribly slow (which was probably attributed to the lack of graphics processing power in the poweredge server) but I'm not sure if the reason it was so slow was purely a visual problem (and that it was actually running normally but the bad graphics were making it seem slow) or if it was actually really slow. 

 

Any ideas on the topic would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

OS X strictly forbids doing this, and most virtualization software checks to make sure you have mac hardware (and also uses the mac hardware to forward chassis data to the vm). The only way to do it without a ton of work is to build a virtual hackintosh.

[Mr_Flynn]

If you are using Adobe CC, then you can you just run Media Encoder on the server and setup a network share + watch folder directly on the server. If you are using compressor or some other OS X specific tool, then you're likely out of luck. It is possible to run OS X in virtualbox with modified Yosemite ISOs but that tends to be buggy and a little legally suspicious.

[leadeater]

1 hour ago, Blake said:

unless your running esxi, then you can virtulise other esxi/hyper-v/kvm instances

 

Apart from whiteboxing, there'd be no point...

Server 2016 Hyper-V now officially supports nested virtualization, not that I'm a big Hyper-V user. Microsoft also acknowledged the only real use case for this is test/demos where you need multiple hosts and only have 1 physical server.

 

The other reason they worked on this is one of their versions of Containers is Hyper-V based rather than the traditional Container approach. They did this for security and isolation reasons for multi-tenant scenarios, other reasons too but can't remember them.

[Blake]

23 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Server 2016 Hyper-V now officially supports nested virtualization, not that I'm a big Hyper-V user. Microsoft also acknowledged the only real use case for this is test/demos where you need multiple hosts and only have 1 physical server.

 

The other reason they worked on this is one of their versions of Containers is Hyper-V based rather than the traditional Container approach. They did this for security and isolation reasons for multi-tenant scenarios, other reasons too but can't remember them.

Containers are great and all, they just need a lot more work on the security side of things, seeing as your container shares it's kernal with the host.

[leadeater]

25 minutes ago, Blake said:

Containers are great and all, they just need a lot more work on the security side of things, seeing as your container shares it's kernal with the host.

Yea, Microsoft's solution to that is the Hyper-V container. Don't know much about it past the sales pitch at the conference I just went to that talked about it. Personally not done much with containers, don't have the time or the pressing need.

 

Currently on my list of 'Great in theory but yet to win me over'.