Given that Apple does not design their OS to work on anything but their hardware, the pain I would incur trying to set up either option is just not worth it. Unless someone has published a stable and updated pre-built VM for macOS, it just seems like nothing but trouble.
Not so long ago I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to setup a Hackintosh VM in VirtualBox --- all I did was create a VM with the default settings, add the all-important SMCDeviceKey, insert a completely stock El Capitan ISO, and it booted up and installed on the first try. All on hardware that was as non-Apple as it gets (a ThinkPad.)
The only thing that I found somewhat confusing and perhaps a bit un-Apple was the fact that the installer would not prompt me to partition and format the HDD first, but was perfectly happy to let me try to select and then fail to install onto the install media itself (with an odd "not enough space" message); I had to use the Disk Utility to do that before going back to the installer. I've always wondered why --- even Windows' installer includes partitioning and formatting as one of its steps.
You should look up if your hardware has been used for Hackintosh by anyone else. I lucked out and my PC has nearly identical specs to this /r/hackintosh post and my install went flawlessly:
https://www.reddit.com/r/hackintosh/comments/2mgq9e/everythi...
iOS emulator (part of XCode) might be enough.