Inspired by Rob Potvin’s MacAdmins presentation and baking guide on virtualising macOS on Apple Silicon, I moved beyond standard UTM setups to explore a repeatable pipeline using Tart, Packer, and Ansible—fully “variablising” the workflow for automated VM builds.
Most guides rely on default admin/admin credentials, so I reworked the Packer templates to accept dedicated user configurations and Jamf Pro enrollment settings, while navigating Apple’s updated build orders and setup screens.
I tuned the wait sequences and automated commands to get clean macOS VM build times down under 10 minutes on Apple Silicon. All the templates and scripts are available in my GitHub Repo - macOS Virtualisation.