I am curious to know if it's possible to use my MacBook Pro as virtual host to test application in different OS environments. I guess it would improve performance of applications running on virtual OS .
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I'm pretty sure all Macs support virtualization and don't require any configuration to do so. – Bob Mar 13 '17 at 23:38
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Does Mac support kernel based virtual machines ? – Ciasto piekarz Mar 13 '17 at 23:54
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Can't cite an "official" answer, but seeing as I can virtualize a whole lot using Parallels Desktop on my MacBook Air with decent performance, it has to have hardware or firmware support. The days of viable pure-software virtualization are far behind us. – Bob Mar 14 '17 at 0:00
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Yes, All recent Macs support virtualization.
Apple released native hypervisor functionality with their OS X Yosemite release, their Hypervisor.framework.
What this does is it allows you to run a VM natively on OS X, without the need for client hypervisor (such as VMware Fusion or VirtualBox).
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1Could you please add relevant sections from your source to the body if possible? It makes it easier to read and provides security in case the link dies. – JMY1000 Mar 14 '17 at 1:56
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1Thanks for your answer. As per @JMY1000 's comment, please provide at least a brief summary of the Source. Over time links break and then anyone else looking at your answer will be stuck. – Monomeeth♦ Mar 14 '17 at 2:08
There are a handful of Intel processor extensions that indicate easy virtualization (VMX / APIC) - but anyone could write a virtualization engine on code alone with enough smarts, budget, engineering so just because a specific extension is lacking, you can't virtualize.
That being said - you'll be hard pressed to find a Mac running OS X (now macOS) that doesn't have VMX or better:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86_virtualization
sysctl machdep.cpu.features
