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Introduction to vfuse

vfuse is a command line utility that converts a bootable DMG to a VMware Fusion VM. The typical use case for vfuse is to quickly test your AutoDMG-derived image. However, with a bit of elbow grease, one could utilize vfuse to clone existing OS X system drives, create vagrant boxes, or manage an on-demand virtual machine service, just to name a few examples.

Requirements

• VMware Fusion 11.x Professional or above
• OS X 10.14+
• A never-booted image created with AutoDMG.
• (optional) Packer 1.1.1 (or above) for building a vagrant box.
• (optional) qemu-img

Basic usage

Running vfuse does not necessarily require sudo rights, but if you don't want to be prompted in the GUI for an admin password, you will want to run it with sudo. (Escalated privileges is required to run the vmware-vdiskmanager binary, which vfuse uses.)

The only required argument is -i or --input, which will create a virtual machine called macos-vm.vmwarevm in the current working directory:

vfuse -i /path/to/dmg