This is my go-to method for creating a quick and easy virtual macOS machine if you have an Apple host.

  1. Install VMware Fusion on your macOS host.
  2. Click “File” > “New”
  3. Select “Install macOS from the recovery partition”
  4. Select the recovery partition.
    To determine where that exists, you can run diskutil list in the Terminal and look for “Recovery or “Recovery HD”. In the example below, the partition with “Recovery” is on /dev/disk1.
/dev/disk0 (internal, physical):
    #:                   TYPE NAME                    SIZE        IDENTIFIER
    0:  GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.3 GB    disk0
    1:                    EFI EFI                     314.6 MB    disk0s1
    2:             Apple_APFS Container               500.0 GB    disk1

/dev/disk1 (synthesized):
    #:                   TYPE NAME                    SIZE        IDENTIFIER
    0:  APFS Container Scheme -                      +500.0 GB    disk1
                              Physical Store disk0s2
    1:            APFS Volume Macintosh HD            11.0 GB     disk1s1
    2:            APFS Volume Macintosh HD - Data     257.7 GB    disk1s1
    3:            APFS Volume Preboot                 82.5 GB     disk1s1
    4:            APFS Volume Recovery                529.0 GB    disk1s1
    5:            APFS Volume VM                      1.1 GB      disk1s1

Note: Even if you upgrade your host machine, that won’t affect the version running in your VM. I’ve tested this with keeping my VM at Catalina while upgrading my host to BigSur. So far, no issues but we’ll see :)