For VMWare, go to the troubleshooting forum (opens in new tab), where you’ll find a wealth of things to try if a VM isn’t performing as you expect still, many of the tips there will, once again, apply to VirtualBox and Parallels as well. Look out for platform-specific tweaks, though. It’s written for Parallels Desktop, but much of it you can adapt to VirtualBox or VMWare. Next, follow the walkthrough opposite to optimise your VM, test its performance and then tweak further if necessary.

This will also help maximise performance. In our case, such programs were continuously forcing the VM to crash or 'froze' for minutes.

When you finally reach your virtualized Mac's desktop, try launching a relatively more graphics-heavy application than a mere notepad, like a web browser.

Next, make sure you install the dedicated hardware drivers for your VM’s operating system, if you haven’t already – that means installing Parallels Tools (opens in new tab), VMWare Tools (opens in new tab) or VirtualBox Additions (If you use VirtualBox (opens in new tab), you should also download and install the VirtualBox Extension Pack from its website to add USB 2.0 and USB 3 support). With those tweaks applied, run your VMWare software and hit 'play' on your macOS virtual machine.

Open your virtualisation tool and make sure it’s fully up to date – all three of the virtualisation tools we’ve mentioned are frequently updated to fix bugs and improve overall performance. VMWare Fusion adopts a similar configuration tool to that employed by Parallels Desktop Get optimising

How to run mac os x in vmware