Apple Silicon (arm64) - what should I do with VirtualBox-based examples?

[geerlingguy]

I'm considering maybe changing everything to libvirt, since I believe I could make the examples cross-platform that way (Linux, macOS M1/Intel, and Windows) like I could recommending VirtualBox.

Also, I have an M1 Mac now.

Requirements:

• Be able to run arbitrary Ubuntu (latest LTS) and maybe Rocky Linux 8 virtualized instances
• Be able to assign an IP address to that instance (ideally ... some examples don't need it)
• Be able to run multiple instances at the same time, and have them be able to communicate with each other via hostname or IP address (ideally).

I also saw UTM, but it seems like it might not be as focused on the programmatic Vagrant-based use case (infrastructure as code) I use here.

Another option is to go to the cloud, but I don't like telling people to do things that could cost them money.

Update: Here are some of the solutions I've been trying out on my Mac:

• UTM
• Tart
• Lima
• OrbStack

[geerlingguy]

Throwing a few notes in here:

• UTM can set up a bridged network (Bridge Networking Support utmapp/UTM#358), but other networking support could be... weird (see Configure shared networking IP address utmapp/UTM#3294).
• There's an open but unworked feature request for Vagrant support for UTM (Provider for UTM (VM for M1 processors) hashicorp/vagrant#12518) — and there's also no direct support for QEMU, and the libvirt API compatibility layer with QEMU doesn't work on Apple Silicon yet either.
• Slightly-related: Trellis and Apple Silicon roots/trellis#1253 — Trellis seems to be recommending Parallels, but I'd like to have a solution that doesn't require any paid software.

Basically, this is probably fairly niche since many infrastructure automation folks run Linux on their workstation (so all this is a non-issue), but I still wonder—for those who do need to emulate 'real' hosts on their M1 Macs... what are they doing currently? I am using Docker for everything else at this point, but there are times when I want to control four isolated VMs accessible to each other only via IP.

[o0-o]

A (the?) UTM dev created an issue to track Vagrant integration the other day so it seems like there is some willingness to make that happen. Is anyone seriously working on libvirt for this? In my experience, it's been a second class citizen as both a Vagrant provider and macOS application (correct me if I'm wrong).

[danielporto]

that's actually very interesting use case. I'm thinking about having a macmini to deploy several services and woudl like to have a way to control vms remotely. so far, there is no tool, web interface that allow me to do that. and I must open a remote desktop into the "server" to boot up a vm.
I could replace the OS for linux, sure, but what if I want a M1 mac mini? Linux support is not quite there yet.

[zmingxie]

Related vagrant-libvirt is currently having installation issues with M1 mac because of confusing ruby native packages: vagrant-libvirt/vagrant-libvirt#1205

[trinitronx]

Related vagrant-libvirt is currently having installation issues with M1 mac because of confusing ruby native packages: vagrant-libvirt/vagrant-libvirt#1205

Yes, this is still correct as of today when using officially released vagrant and plugin gems.

It's definitely possible to build all the pieces from source and get a native arm64 Vagrant + vagrant-libvirt stack working on an M1 macBook. It's just a lot of extra work at the moment.

[kamidev]

Thanks a lot @trinitronx! Great to know this is already possible.

[johalun]

There's also this one https://github.com/ppggff/vagrant-qemu that I've played around with a bit for running x86_64 Linux VMs on Apple Silicon.
I don't know how feature rich it is but it would be nice to have a pure qemu provider that is 100% cross platform.

[jmgilman]

So has anyone found a decent solution for this? The closest I've been able to get is Multipass, but it's not very customizable and heavily geared towards Ubuntu (for obvious reasons). The best solution I've come across is Parallels but, as noted, it's not free software.

[Nurmukhamed]

Hello.
For book examples I used terraform, because Vagrant is slow and old software.
You may look examples here - https://github.com/Nurmukhamed/AnsibleForDevops

[geerlingguy]

I recently became aware of Tart, which instead of QEMU uses Apple's native Virtualization framework. It seems to run very well on my M1/M2 Macs, and is built more for CI/scripted use than apps like UTM, Parallels, and Fusion.

There is currently an issue requesting Linux support, and I would be keen to test that—even if some manual tart commands would have to be run prior to running an Ansible playbook. I've already tested my macOS-oriented mac-dev-playbook with Tart, and it works great: geerlingguy/mac-dev-playbook#160 (comment)

There's also an issue requesting a Vagrant plugin for Tart.