Cannot recreate guest macOS VM with clone of my macOS workstation

[jasimon9]

I have tried several approaches to create a VM, but get blocked for some reason. Here is what does not work for me:

1. Create a new macOS vm from the Recovery Partition. When I get to the place where you can restore from a Time Machine backup, I get a message that different hardware prevents restoring from Time Machine. Btw, it is quite difficult to even get to this point, as the hard drives always try to connect to the host, rather than the VM.

2. If I request transfer from my Mac, it does not show the appropriate shares. Only some inappropriate shares. I suspect that could be because the disk space in the VM is too small. But there is no way to make it bigger at this point.

3. I tried changing networking to bridged to see if that would help find the host machine, but it did not.

4. Migration Assistance does not apply, as the VM cannot be running while the Migration Assistant runs on the host.

So I am blocked and cannot figure a way to do this task.

 

[dvonroeder]

I'm trying to create a VM from a Time Machine backup of a 2014 MacBook Pro and I'm running into the same issues that you're hitting.
"I get a message that different hardware prevents restoring from Time Machine" - I ran into that trying to install a Time Machine backup of a 2014 MacBook Pro that's running legacy software that won't run on anything higher than 10.11.6.

"I suspect that could be because the disk space in the VM is too small. But there is no way to make it bigger at this point."
I ran into that and, just now, replied to Parallels TS -
"I increased the hard drive size to 256 GB, not expandable, and tried to recover from the Time Machine backup but there wasn't enough disk space. The 256GB setting is sufficient but the "Macintosh HD" hard drive in the VM did not resize from its 70GB size.
How do I get the hard drive in the virtual machine to resize to 256GB?"

If I find a solution to that issue, I'll post the update.

Some feedback on your issue:
The way to ensure that you have access to the volume that contains the Time Machine backup is via the "disk" icon in the upper right corner of the VM window. When you select a volume from the dropdown menu, Parallels unmounts the volume.

If you've got the Time Machine backup on the startup drive, the host OS won't relinquish control so you'll have to move the backup to another volume. I used a hard drive dock + a spare HD and that worked fine.

I have a case open with Parallels Tech Support and I really hope that they can come up with a solution. If not, I might give Fusion a try.

 

[jasimon9]

The issue I originally posed on 21-Apr-20 was never resolved. I gave up. I have had to revisit the task again and I was able to get a bit further, but I am still having road blocks. What I am trying to do is create a macOS VM, connect it to a time machine backup from my main machine. Since this is a common use case, you would think there are instructions to do so. But I cannot find any that work.

I got further than last time by adding the following steps:

1. In Time Machine on the host, remove the backup destination. The idea is that Time Machine otherwise seems to open files on the Time Machine volume, thus preventing it from being ejected from its host connection.
2. Reboot the host so that no files will be open on the Time Machine volume.
3. After the VM is initially created, open the configure dialog, then shut down the VM to allow certain changes to be made.
4. Go into the Hardware tab of Configure, and add a disk drive from the available drives shown.

At this point I would expect to be able to connect the Time Machine volume to the guest macOS. However, the problem is that no matter what I have tried so far, the Time Machine volume gets immediately connected to the host. So it cannot be connected to the guest.

EDIT:
After posting the above, I tried once more, but this time it worked. Here is what I did:

1. In host Disk Utility, eject all the volumes on the disk. The main disk hardware would not eject, and a message was shown that files were in use, even though no volumes were mounted. I decided to go on anyways.
2. In guest macOS, view Configure and observe that Disk 2 is already configured for the Time Machine hard drive.
3. Reboot the macOS guest.
4. This time, when Finder came up, the volumes on the Time Machine hard drive where mounted.

I am not sure why after about the third or fourth repetition of the steps it finally worked.

 

[jasimon9]

I once again have the same need, but with newer hardware and software. Now I am on an Apple Studio and working with Monterey.
Same issue. It seem Parallels VM for macOS does not allow devices to be attached. My goal is to duplicate my host machines environment for various testing purposes. The obvious way to clone the host would be to restore a Time Machine backup. But Parallels will not apparently allow that still. I tried the same steps as described above. Especially, when the device is ejected and reconnected, it does not allow connection to the macOS VM.
I tried to force this the following dialog, but as you can see in the screen shot, the macOS VM is not available.

 

[jasimon9]

I have found the probable explanation of these difficulties at https://kb.parallels.com/128867. In that article it gives the limitation that USB devices cannot be attached to the VM. So that's that.