How to convert a Physical OS X machine to Virtual Machine

I would like to migrate an existing OSX 10.9.5 machine to a 10.9.5 Guest VM running on a 10.10.1 host.

My situation is: I own a 10.9.5 MBP that I use everyday. I have development tools on the machine that I am not sure work on Yosemite. I bought a new MBP that runs 10.10.1.

I would like to migrate the old machine en-masse to as a guest machine, then I can migrate piecemeal off of the VM onto the native machine.

I have tried several things, but these instructions seemed most promising:

1. Build a simple guest machine using "Install OS X Mavericks.app".
2. Boot that VM using safe mode.
3. Connect my USB based Carbon Copy Cloner Bootable image.
4. Start OSX migration assistant (not VMWare migration assistant).
5. Chose to migrate from CCC.
6. wait.

I have not been successful.

The immediate problem is that the USB drive is not visible to the VM so I am stuck at Step 3. usb mount problem

Apple support politely denied help as soon as I said VMWare.

This is how I did it:

1. Create a Image File on an external drive (Sparse Bundle, so the size of the original drive can be variable
2. On the source machine, use SuperDuper or CCC to copy the drive to the image file/bundle
3. Using Fusion 8.5 create an OSX VM using the recovery drive
4. Add an additional drive to the VM
5. Mount the external drive into the VM
6. Mount the image file on the external drive
7. Use SuperDuper or CCC to copy the mounted image to the additional drive created in 4
8. Set the startup disk to be the copied drive
9. Stop the VM, delete the original drive, restart, and you should have your original machine in a VM.

Apple support politely denied help as soon as I said VMWare.

Sounds about right. While it's EUAL contractually legal to run OS X in a VM, Apple will scoff at you for this.

I'm assuming you're using at least an N-1 version of VMware Fusion. I've had success with this general process:

1. Backup your OS to any external drive using Time Machine (ditch CCC for this exercise)
2. Create a new VM using "Install from image" and select More Options.
3. Choose "Install OSX from the Recovery Partition"
4. Follow the prompts and once you're in the Recovery partition, elect to restore from Time Machine.
5. Once you're confident your data is in the VM, upgrade your host to Yosemite. NOTE THAT you'll need to upgrade to Fusion v7.x to run on an 10.10 host.

The other option is to just build the guest VM the same way and cp the files over once you have networking setup. The challenge here is file ACLs and ownership. Plus the whole app reinstall hassle.

Hope this helps.