I've been running my macOS desktop in an ESXi VM for over a year now. I came from a hackintosh, but got tired of the fragility of some upgrades. Some notes on this setup: - Apple supports macOS running inside of ESXi. Officially, only on Apple host hardware (i.e. a Mac Pro, which is on the ESXi compatibility list). Apple even ships a VMXNet3 network driver in macOS. - For ESXi specifically, you have to patch the host…
I remember a long time ago (maybe close to a decade?) I was looking into this a bit because I was interested in iPhone dev, and the requirement that that toolchain use Mac hardware was hard for me to swallow. It still seemed fairly hacky at that point, and ultimately I wasn't willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for a dev license and hardware just to see if it was worth it and I wasn't willing to go that far into…
VMWare Workstation can be patched to run vanilla macOS installs too, but unless you're running it under a boot camp'ed Windows on real Apple hardware, it's a license violation: https://github.com/DrDonk/unlocker
You can't buy individual macOS licenses these days, as far as I know. Apple hasn't charged for macOS or updates for at least a few years now. Their license text includes references to volume licensing, but I guess that's for very large-scale companies with direct contacts.