Hi All,
I am trying to build a home lab, and I have a MacBook Pro M2 Silicon. I followed the instructor’s steps and VirtualBox is not behaving as I expected. Has anyone experienced such issue and how did you go about creating the virtualised environment on your MacBook silicon series.
try vmware fusion. as it is specifically for Mac.
Yeah, I am already using that for my Kali, but I am trying to spin up an already configured CentOS and not sure where to get an ISO file for tha,t as the course used VDI from OSBOXES. Any alternative to VMware Fusion?
Virtualbox has only very limited support for AS Macs. I personally have never gotten it to work on my M4 laptop. But some people have succeeded; you’ll need to scour the internet for videos about set up, to find something that wll work for you. I can’t recommend it, however.
If you want to use CentOS type systems on an Apple Silicon Mac, you’re pretty much limited to using VMWare’s virtualization packages. This works, both directly and using vagrant where you can find VMWare / arm64 boxes.
If you can use Debian/Ubuntu type systems, then you have a lot more options. I personally use multipass, which is versatile and relatively easy to set up. UTM, a very Mac-centric package, also works well I’m told.
Thanks for your response. I am using VMware Fusion, and I have Kali on it that works fine as an ISO file. However, the DevOps course encouraged the use of prebuilt CentOS, which I absolutely support because it can be daunting to build images.
UTM did not work either for the CentOS VMDK image downloaded from OXBoxes. I downloaded a stream Centos image and it is working fine.
My real question is, for those using Mac M series chip, can KodeKloud offer a solution? Courses should be update at least because I am sure I am not the only one running into this issue.
CentOS images tend to not be very friendly with VMWare and arm64; I’ve had little luck with them. What does work is Rocky LInux 9 and and Alma Linux 9; these work using VMWare and vagrant, and are what I recommend. Haven’t tried Kali, TBH. But Rocky and Alma work extremely well, and are both distributions designed to be compatible with CentOS 9.
We’ve also created a repo for our Ansible course that’s set up for VMWare, which would be a good starting point. Give it a try.