Virtuals are useful for so many things. I often use them to have a clean OS on which to test the installation of various software applications with an extremely fast and reliable way to revert back to the clean OS snapshot.

I recently discovered that using Parallels Desktop Lite (free from the app store) in addition to creating Windows and Linux virtuals on your MacOS host you can also easily create MacOS virtuals.

This Mac on Mac virtualization was documented here:
https://engineering.rallyhealth.com/tools/mac/virtualization/2018/04/27/mac-on-mac-virtualization.html

Using the above as a jumping off point, I was also able to create a MacOS virtual from a disk image of a fully-loaded source Mac using the following steps:

1) Create a basic MacOS virtual (see above) using the same version of the MacOS that is on the source mac. Also, be sure to set the settings to a disk size that will accommodate your disk image. I set my virtual to use 128 GBs since my disk image was close to 95 GBs! I also increased the memory from 2 GBs to 4 GBs at the same time.
2) Complete that entire setup and boot the resulting virtual to ensure it boots!
3) Shutdown that MacOS in that virtual (not suspend, not restart, I mean shutdown!). Use “Shutdown” from the Apple menu!
4) In the Parallels Desktop Lite configuration settings for the virtual you just created, choose to boot the virtual to your bootable, external USB drive that has both the disk image of your source mac and your imaging software of choice (I use Carbon Copy Cloner). Note that I use “read-only, compressed” disk images for this and just about everything else.
5) Once your virtual is booted to your external drive, follow your routine for restoring the disk image to the drive in the virtual. I always completely erase the target drive with something like Disk Utility before restoring a disk image to avoid any strangeness with merged systems!
6) When the restore is complete, shutdown your virtual again.
7) Once again, configure the virtual’s settings, this time to boot to the normal hard disk rather then the external drive that has your imaging software on it.
8) Boot your fully loaded and now virtualized mac desktop!

In my case, I also did a happy dance!