How to create an OS X El Capitan Guest VM (Parallels 11, Host is El Capitan)

I am having no luck so far creating an El Capitan virtual machine. Are there specific steps I need to follow to do this successfully (I have not seen many guides for post-Beta).

 

That article does not discuss El Capitan.
That article is about installing 10.6 from an installation DVD; but El Capitan is not distributed as an installation DVD.

 

IS this why I cannot use Parallels because of EL Capitan? I am pretty well sunk on bookkeeping right now. My El Capitan was installed through the internet as well. I am able to open parallels but I am not able to open IE or Quicken, which is all I use. HELP?

SO when the box comes up saying there is no application set to open the document and it is the MAC face on the box, I choose the application on the MAC Side for Quicken and it opened. But I have no application for IE on the mac side? It still wants an app for that too. ???? AND why the black blinking screens?

 

Hi LaurieP, please try re-installing Parallels Tools and check how it goes. Refer to this KB article.

 

I too have been unable to create a working El Capitan virtual machine. My host system is the latest version of El Capitan, 10.11.2. I'm running the latest version of Parallels Desktop, 11.1.1. When I try to create a VM from the recovery partition, it starts to boot; the progress bar under the apple gets a little more than half way; then I get the circle with the slash through it. Re-installing Parallels Desktop did not change anything. What must I do to create an El Capitan VM?

 

Try creating an Yosemite virtual machine and thus upgrading to El Capitan. Please let us know how it goes.

 

Thank you.

But how am I to create a Yosemite virtual machine, since I'm using a host that is running El Capitan, and so its recovery partition is that of El Capitan?

 

Hi @DanP1 you can get it installed from an .iso image file too. Please contact Apple support for the .iso image file for Mac OS X Yosemite.

 

It is poor product support like this that makes me consider switching to VMware Fusion every year when the new versions of each are released and I need to decide if I am going to upgrade to the new version of Parallels or switch to the new version of Fusion, which, by the way, supports OS X 10.11 El Capitan as a host and a guest. El Capitan has been a public release for 3 months and according to this support document it is not a supported guest OS for Parallels Desktop 11. Instead of supporting El Capitan, Parallels forces a paying customer to contact Apple to get an ISO, which is not even available. Apple may make the Install OS X Yosemite.app install available in the Mac App Store, but there is no ISO. Ridiculous.

 

Please follow this blog for installing El Capitan as we have addressed the issues under the latest build of Parallels which can be downloaded here.

 

Thank you for the correct solution.

 

Glad to help you out! Please let us know if you need any further support.