Ask HN: How do you run multiple VMs on Apple Silicon M1?

15 points

4 years ago

My goal: run N Ubuntu VMs on a MBP M1 using either host-only or bridged networking mode. On my previous Intel MBP I was using Vagrant and Virtualbox as provider. This worked wonderful. Now, as you may know, Virtualbox doesn’t work anymore on M1s. I looked around at alternatives, and the panorama doesn’t look good as of now:

- qemu. Quite versatile. Works with hvf and it’s fast! Sadly, it doesn’t support yet advanced network modes (bridged, host-only) for mac. There exists unofficial patches that implement vmnet (https://gitlab.com/qemu-project/qemu/-/issues/465#note_824941037) but they are unstable and require running qemu as root

- UTM (https://mac.getutm.app/) also works fine, but doesn’t offer advanced network modes for multiple VMs (it relies on qemu behind the curtains anyway)

- vagrant + vmware fusion. This is the most promising one. But vmware fusion for M1 is still in “tech preview” mode. Also it’s unstable (https://gist.github.com/sbailliez/f22db6434ac84eccb6d3c8833c85ad92)

- docker. Not really a replacement. I need to replicate cloud environments locally (so I need VMs running systemd. The VMs themselves may run docker)

Anyone else in the same boat?

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