It used to be that you could create a VMware Fusion virtual machine Mac, enroll it in Jamf (either by spoofing the serial number for Automated Device Enrollment or just using an auto-generated VM serial for manual enrollment).

Recently (not sure when, exactly), you may have noticed if you try to enroll a VMware Fusion Mac in Jamf, it will install the MDM profile… and that’s it. No jamf binary. No /var/log/jamf.log file. Your VM did enroll, but it enrolled to Devices, not to Computers.

To get it to enroll as a Computer in Jamf, you’ll need to remove the existing enrollment profile, shut down fully (not suspend/sleep) your VM, edit the VM’s .vmx file (right-click the VM and select Show Package contents to find the .vmx file) with a text editor, and set the following:

SMBIOS.use12CharSerialNumber = "TRUE"
serialNumber = "SERIAL"
hw.model = "MODEL"
serialNumber.reflectHost = "FALSE"
hw.model.reflectHost = "FALSE"
smbios.reflectHost = "FALSE"

where SERIAL is a fake serial number of your choice, and MODEL is the model you want to spoof (e.g., MacBookPro15,2).

Then, restart your VM, and try to enroll in Jamf again. If your spoofed serial is a real serial that’s in Apple Business Manager or Apple School Manager and assigned to your Jamf MDM, you can use sudo profiles renew -type enrollment to try to use Automated Device Enrollment, or you can go to your Jamf manual enrollment URL, authenticate, and manually enroll in Jamf.

If all goes well, your VM Mac should now be recognized as a Computer (Mac) and not a Device (iPhone/iPad).

Special shoutout to kevin.v on the MacAdmins Slack for the tip.