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WorkOS
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Dear fellow Mac users,
What’s your favourite hypervisor for a macOS host?
I’m currently pondering what hypervisor to use and would appreciate some input from other Mac users. What has worked well for you folks, what hasn’t worked well?
See below for some options that I have found.
Would love to hear from you regarding this matter.
PARALLELS
Good performance. Support is included in the subscription. Works with M1 CPUs. A Vagrant provider is available. Proprietary software.
Website: https://www.parallels.com/eu/products/desktop/
VMWARE FUSION
Supposedly stable. A Vagrant provider is available. M1 CPUs still in beta. No support included(?). Proprietary software.
Website: https://www.vmware.com/se/products/fusion.html
UTM
Open source. Nice clean GUI. Works with M1 CPUs. Community support available. No Vagrant provider available. Not so mature, still quite buggy.
Website: https://mac.getutm.app/
QEMU (with our without libvirt)
Open source. Works with M1 CPUs. Community support available. No mature Vagrant provider available.
Configuration is not straight-forward. Guides and documentation are mostly related to Linux hosts, much of that information is not relevant for a macOS host. HVF support is probably not mature yet.
Unclear how to configure networking[0].
Website: See https://wiki.qemu.org/Features/HVF, https://www.qemu.org/ and https://libvirt.org/
VIRTUALBOX
Open source. A Vagrant provider is available. Community support available. No M1 support.
I’ve found the GUI to be buggy on recent versions of macOS. And I’m not fond of using products that are owned and developed by Oracle.
Website: https://virtualbox.org/
[0] See e.g. https://listman.redhat.com/archives/libvirt-users/2022-March/013501.html
I was happiest with xhyve https://github.com/machyve/xhyve
Serial console in terminal was nice (for me!), network configuration was trash (I think I was able to set the subnet by fiddling around with system plists? and it would revert from time to time), and I didn't have to deal with Virtualbox. I've been away from macs for a while, I don't know if xhyve works on the M1, but it might. I ran a FreeBSD vm so I could run my server code on my laptop in an environment that was like production but slower.