Dualboot OSX, second partition also as VM

Question

Does anyone have experience with this:

I set up my MacPro with a triple boot system (Snow Leopard, Mavericks, Windows).

It is a bit of a hassle to boot switch between the two OSX's and running either OS X in a normal VM off a virtual HDD is just so awfully slow.

I would now like to boot one of my OSXs that is already installed as an option in a VM as well but keep the dual boot option.

Say: SL is running native, and I boot the Mavericks of the other partition in a VM and run them together. I guess that should be possible. I wouldn't know how to set that up though.

Advantage here would really be to get the full speed of my SSD to push data around. If I load windows via bootcamp in Parallels I get that nice benefit. I would love to have that for OSX in OSX as well.

The point here would be to test application environments that behave similar to the natively booted OS instead of a pure VM version that slows down because of the virtual harddrive. This would allow me to rough test different hardware configurations more efficiently and accurately.

Thanks for any help!

Answer 1

To be honest, I have never done it, but I have kept this reference for a dark and stormy night when I would have nothing better to do. It appears to be possible with VMWare. It is amusing that he did this with the free version, not the paid one. There is nothing magic nor tricky, it is all quite standard. Let us know whether this works.