UPDATE 2011-11-19: According to several blogs, VMWare Fusion 4.1 now officially runs Mac OS X 10.5, 10.6 and 10.7 (as long as you confirm that you have a valid license for virtualization). A VMWare TechNote confirms this, so I assume the change is here to stay. In my testing, even my 10.4 VM worked just as before.
UPDATE 2011-11-22: According to VMWare, this new feature is a bug. The TechNote linked above is no longer available and the whole thing pretty much sounds like VMWare changed their mind and/or was pressured by Apple.
Back in 2009, I wrote about how to install Mac OS X (non-Server) versions in VMWare Fusion. Since then, Apple has released Snow Leopard (which worked just fine using the exact same hints). VMWare just released Fusion 4.0 today (which officially supports Lion as a guest OS), so I wanted to see whether my old hint still works.
Fusion 4.0 no longer uses /Library/VMWare Fusion for all its support files, but is all self-contained (it even runs all its background services on-demand, which I quite like) and has its stuff in /Applications/VMWare Fusion.app/Contents/Library. So MultiMac Helper (which patches Fusion’s Mac OS X Server detection stuff to trick it into also allowing the non-Server versions) no longer worked, but worked fine after fixing the paths. Grab a copy here: MultiMac Helper 4.app
Next, I fired up my Snow Leopard, Leopard and Tiger VMs one after another. Some of them showed “No operating system found” messages, but I was able to fix that by going into the CD/DVD settings and making sure the virtual drive was enabled and set to my physical SuperDrive. It still shows that message sometimes upon boot of the guest OS, but that can be fixed by restarting the VM, shutting it down and starting it again, or hitting Ctrl-Alt-Del. It might take a few tries to get it to work (might be a timing issue?), but will eventually boot up. The boot loader shows some EBIOS errors, but those don’t seem to matter.
I have not yet tried creating new 10.4/10.5/10.6 VMs yet, but that should still work the same as before.
If you’re having any issues (and if possible fixes for those), please let me know in the comments and I’ll update my post. I’m also attaching my VMX files to this post so that you can compare yours to them if you have trouble getting it to work: SnowLeopard.vmx Leopard.vmx Tiger.vmx
I can’t help it, every time I fire up my Tiger VM (which I only do like twice a year), I get all nostalgic about the Aqua GUI. Ok, it’s horribly inconsistent (glossy white menu bar, structured semi-transparent menus and light gray title bars), but hey, it still looks cool.
Note
Before proceeding, make sure you have an appropriate license for Mac OS X. I.e., don’t install two copies if you only own one — in general, this means you need the Family Pack or an additional copy. Also, make sure that you’re allowed to virtualize your copy of OS X — in Germany that is perfectly fine as limitations imposed by the EULA are effectively not legally binding (which is the reason why the German computer magazine c’t was able to publish MultiMac Helper), but you will need to check what applies in your own country.
UPDATE: If you create a new VM, you need to remove firmware = "efi" from the VMX, or it will complain about the OS not being the server version at some point during boot. If you see the black BIOS-style screen right after powering up the VM, you’re fine. If you see a grey screen with the VMWare logo on it, the VM is set to EFI mode.
However, even then I have not been able to successfully boot a Snow Leopard DVD. This appears to be due to the way VMWare Fusion handles non-EFI OS X boots: Upon boot, it connects darwin.iso to the VM, loads its special bootloader from there. VMWare Fusion 2.0 and 3.0 somehow managed to do that without interfering with the Snow Leopard DVD, but Fusion 4.0 fails at that. I assume it’s not something the VMWare folks would be regression testing because Fusion 3.0 and later by default boot OS X guests in EFI mode.
So the conclusion would be (at least until someone figures out how to patch the virtual EFI) that you need to create your 10.4/10.5/10.6 VMs on VMWare Fusion 2.0 (or 3.0 which requires you to manually remove the firmware = "efi" line as well). They’ll run in Fusion 4.0 just fine.
Alternatively, you could try (haven’t tested it yet) to leave the VMX with firmware = "efi", pull an image from your OS X DVD, convert it to read/write, touch /Volumes/OS X Install DVD/System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist (to make Fusion believe it’s a server DVD), convert it to read-only, boot it in the VM, install it. Rebooting into the OS will fail (as it does not have ServerVersion.plist), so remove the firmware = "efi" to switch the VM back to the patched non-EFI bootloader.