In my example, I am running El Capitan, so that is what I will download. To do this, open the App Store and download your version of OS X. Before you get started with the download method, you need to grab a copy of the OS X installer from the App Store. You can install OS X Lion, Mountain Lion, Mavericks, Yosemite, or El Capitan into a virtual machine on your Mac computer. Note that there are two ways to install OS X on VMware fusion: download OS X from the App Store and use that for installing or to use the recovery partition to reinstall OS X. In addition, it doesn’t even work properly for the latest version of OS X. VirtualBox requires using Terminal commands to get OS X installed. VMware Fusion is not free, but has more features and is generally more powerful and easier to use than VirtualBox. There is a free program called VirtualBox, but it has some drawbacks.
In this article, I’ll walk you through the steps to get OS X installed using VMware Fusion. So if you have a MacBook Pro with OS X El Capitan installed, you can install as many copies of El Capitan into virtual machines on that same machine.
