M1 and onwards macbooks, very difficult to setup lab due to no virtual box support

Lab Support
#1

How should i proceed further when i can not setup lab because virtual box is not support on M1 macbooks and onwards. VMware is also not available for mac book , only vmware fusion is option that too with very limited options and no any guide about how to set that up.
Anyone ? half of the world uses M1, M2 and M3

#2

If VMware fusion works, what is the issue with that? Also I wouldn’t agree half the world are on Macs.

#3

There are a number of good options for the newer Macs. I’d recommend trying:

  1. Setting up a lab using multipass. We have a tutorial for that too.
  2. If all you need is a useful Kubernetes cluster that works on modern ARM64 Macs, you can use colima, which works very well as a combined docker/K8s cluster.
#4

i think it doesn’t support spinning up multiple VMs. I am not sure but there can be courses coming ahead that can require to setup multiple VMs and that’s where we will get stuck

#5

I can explore multipass but i think it only supports ubuntu and not CentOS. The course instructor mentioned to work with CentOS but i dont know how strict of a requirement it would be in future courses, and having ubuntu machine won’t stop me from carying the courses ahead

#6

Pretty sure VMware Fusion supports multiple VMs.

#7

If you need to use CentOS or similar distribution, you can use the qemu provider on an M1 mac. You can do it like this:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-qemu
vagrant init generic/rhel9
vagrant up --provider qemu

This worked on my M2 Mac Mini, which is running Sonoma. The qemu plugin doesn’t have great networking support, but it may work well enough for you to get the job done.

#8

You can also get vmware to work. Assuming you have vmware_desktop installed, this works for me as well:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-vmware-desktop
vagrant init gyptazy/rocky9.3-arm64
vagrant up --provider vmware_desktop

This is better than the gyptazy centos 9 install (it’s a buggy 1.0.0 version; rocky is 1.02 and works better), and probably networks better than the qemu provider.

#9

i already tried this method.
I have vmware fusion installed and i can run a instance on it using centOS 9 stream iso file.
But when trying vmware with vagrant i m getting a strange error when running vagrant up --provider vmware_desktop. I have opened an issue in the provider’s github repo and you can checkout the error there.
For now i am continuing having multipass and vmware(not with vagrant) for my courses.

Also one additional thing i would like to confirm , did you also install vagrant vmware utility service as mentioned here

#10

It actually matters, a lot, which vagrant box you use; did you use the exact instructions I gave? The gyptazy/rocky9.3-arm64 box is one of the few that worked without errors. So it’s not just the method – it’s the box you use.

Try my exact suggestion and see if it works.

#11

Just use UTM for Silicone macs , its free

#12

@Abdullah-Abro-Arsala You can use Hypervisor.framework through QEMU. You can use the vagrant-qemu plugin if you use Vagrant to manage virtual machines. The advantage of Vagrant is that the interface is the same for different VM providers, whether virtualbox or qemu.

A easy to follow blog on this:

Also. Hypervisor.framework is built into the macOS, so there’s no need for another hypervisor, unless you prefer an alternative. QEMU is open source, and that tooling can not only operate Hypervisor.framework, but can also use the q35 emulator, should you need to run Intel on Arm. The vagrant-qemu is a wrapper around QEMU to allow the more intuitive Vagrant to manage it altogether. There are some gotchas or things to workaround though, which is in the blog-tutorial.

#13

Thanks for sharing that; I use qemu myself on my M2 Mac Mini; it works well. VMWare is also excellent, and scripts we make available on github that use Vagrant work well with them; we’ve had less luck with qemu on Apple Silicon, TBH.