However, you’ll need to obtain the ISO file for the latest version of macOS Big Sur by yourself. The following links should be helpful to download the files necessary to get macOS Big Sur up and running on your VirtualBox virtual machine without any issues. However, before you get started, you’ll need to download VirtualBox and some additional essential files. This is going to be a pretty long procedure, but we’ll make it as simple as possible. Requirements for Running macOS in VirtualBox If you’re interested in running macOS Big Sur or macOS Monterey in Windows using VirtualBox, then read along.

The operating systems basically run within an application, which virtualizes the hardware, and the OS itself doesn’t know the difference. With VirtualBox, you can install multiple operating systems on a single computer and seamlessly switch between them as you desire. Unlike a Hackintosh, you don’t need any special hardware to get macOS up and running on your computer. Instead, you will be running VirtualBox natively on your Windows computer and installing macOS as a guest operating system within VirtualBox. If the topic of virtualization interests you, check out some more of our posts on the subject.Before you start making assumptions, this is not a super-complicated Hackintosh setup. There are many other options available for virtualization, including the free UTM app which allows you to easily run Windows 11 on an Apple Silicon Mac for example, but there’s also paid solutions including VMWare and Parallels.

Go to to find the appropriate download, listed as “Developer preview for macOS / Arm64 (M1/M2) hosts”.

As usual, VirtualBox is completely free to download and to use. While technically in beta, anyone can get access to the developer preview beta ARM build of VirtualBox through the VirtualBox website. It does this by virtualizing hardware (that you can adjust to allocate RAM, storage capacity, etc), so the operating system itself doesn’t know that it’s not running on actual hardware. VirtualBox is virtualization software that allows you to run other operating systems in containers on your Mac directly from the application, for example you can run Linux or Windows directly within VirtualBox, and without having to use dual-booting or anything else.

Virtualbox macos 11