Native virtualization for macOS | Hacker News Reader

Native virtualization for macOS

veertu.com

230 pointshajderr100 comments

I've tried this as I was really excited after hearing about fusions discontinuation and how incredibly poorly performing virtualbox IO and network is.

I found it to be even slower than virtualbox which I have no idea how this is possible. Tested on a late 2015 5k iMac top specced and a late 2015 MacBook top specced both running OSX 10.11 at the time.

I will re-test the latest version with MacOS 10.12.

VMware Fusion isn't discontinued. I might be wrong, but wasn't the last update in September? And you can still buy it from VMware.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/01/27/vmware_fusion_and_wo...

Entire team got fired, but yes still being maintained from a new team of outsourced devs.

Whoa. Why in the world could that have happened? Article doesn't really go into any theories.

I would imagine sales numbers wouldn't justify a full US based development team in 'maintenance mode'.

Unfortunately, their annual reports don't breakout revenue by product: http://ir.vmware.com/overview/financial-information/annual-r...

The company probably feels they can do just as well (at a lower cost) with outsourced devs.

Well that is working out horribly so far. Fusion 8.5.x is unusable on 10.12 due to a bug that causes an immediate crash when grabbing input control. I as well as many others reported the bug long ago but they have been unable to fix it. No surprise - the outsourced team is probably still scratching their heads trying to figure out what's what.

> Fusion 8.5.x is unusable on 10.12

Works for me and many others here, so there's more going on with your setup than just Fusion and Sierra not getting along.

Works fine here too, but you are correct that this is a serious issue that people are bumping into.

Here's a quote from the product line marketing manager from VMware Fusion on this topic [0]

<quote>

We're really sorry about this situation, but rest assured it's our #1 bug right now.

It's technically both our and Apple's bug. The default behaviour of something we always called/did was changed in a later near-final build of 10.12, and that introduced this bug.

We and Apple are working together but like always we can't disclose timelines.

Please note that we are absolutely working on resolving this issue and issuing an update as soon as we can.

</quote>

[0] https://communities.vmware.com/message/2630278#2630278

Why would/should Dell care about virtualization on macOS?

For the same reason any company should care about any product? Because selling goods and services at a profit is a sensible business model?

What if they estimate it's not worth the effort? Or is misaligned with other interests?

e.g. Apple could sell macOS licenses to run in a VM on non-Apple hardware, but they don't. To run macOS per the EULA, it can only be done on Apple hardware.

oh jesus. somehow this flew under my radar. this isn't good

The only updates I remember since I last bought Fusion (just over a year ago, not long before their announcement) was a security update (I think that was the one in September you refer to) and perhaps a small point release or two.

I'm not really expecting any awesome new features, just bug fixes mostly.

As I move (mostly) back to Linux on the desktop, I'd really like to use VMware but I can't rationalize $249 for a product that is quite possible "end of life" (for all practical purposes).

It is the same under macOS 10.12.1. I tried it (can't beat free!), and within a few days I was back on Fusion.

Found the same on a 2015 rMBP with max specs (Sierra, 16GB RAM, Core i7). It's much less performant with exactly the same VM as VirtualBox.

In fact, it ate my entire CPU while it was running, even when the VM OS (Windows 10) settled down after startup. and was apparently running no CPU-intensive processes.

It also crashed twice in the space of an hour, bringing down the entire VM, necessitating a restart.

Not touching Veertu again for a long time.

Maybe it was because windows update was running in the background?

Could very well have been a factor. I gave up on it quickly. Repeatedly crashing renders it an unnecessary annoyance. VirtualBox works well enough, is stable and reliable, and Veertu doesn't distinguish itself enough to merit the pain in switching.

See new comments of trial I'm running today - I'm replying to my main post as I go.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12916309

Where did you hear that it was being discontinued?

Totally different results here. I use a Surface Book now but on my Mac (2013 MBA) Veertu destroyed VMware and VirtualBox for interactive latency.

Ie, VirtualBox and VMware were slow to the point I'd consider them unusable (I'm latency sensitive, eg, I consider Eclipse to the be same and other people think it's fine). Veertu made me actually test in Edge again.

Did you still have VMware or VirtualBox drivers installed? IIRC VMware doesn't actually remove itself when you uninstall it, you have to remove the kmods yourself.

That is weird. I've used Virtualbox and VMWare on my MacBook Pros, and interactive latency has always been indistinguishable from a native application.

I'm latency sensitive as well, and just wondering: have you found any virtualization solution on Windows which provides usable performance for Linux guests?

See new comments of trial I'm running today - I'm replying to my main post as I go.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12916309

I see Parallels isn't in that list of software. Is there a reason you don't use it?

Not OP but I, personally, stopped using Fusion because of the constant annoying advertisements. I could understand if it were free but I paid a non-trivial amount for it out-of-pocket.

I can't complain about Parallels' performance. I was satisfied with it in that regard.

I assume you mean Parallels in the first paragraph? I use Fusion and have never seen an ad in it.

Oops. Yes, thanks.

Parallels is even slower than VirtualBox and it's like Duplo to Lego, 'Parallels - my first VM'

Source on VirtualBox being faster? Couple of benchmarks I've seen put VirtualBox at considerably slower[1] and Fusion slightly to considerably faster than Parallels.

1- https://www.tekrevue.com/2015-vm-benchmarks-parallels-11-vs-...

OK just re-tested with the latest version (which is very different looking for sure) on the latest OSX on my top specced late 2015 iMac 5K 27''.

I mounted the latest CentOS 7 ISO image, completely standard and md5 summed, it boots to install and I have no keyboard or mouse control OR the VM is immediately frozen.

Seemed to boot faster than Fusion which is an improvement from the last time I tried.

I'll next try a shudder Windows 10 shudder VM.

I just re-tried installing CentOS 7 for the 4th time from the install DVD again and mouse / keyboard randomly works!? I don't think it was user error, but I'm not convinced it was a bug in the software either, perhaps my desktop was blocking usb access for some reason.

Performance of the install seems a LOT better than last time I tried.

Will report back.

I found that bridged networking does not work at all, no traffic flows, but the default 'shared' networking works perfectly.

I'm now doing an update of CentOS and will install the latest stable kernel from elrepo kernel-ml and fio, then I'll benchmark disk IO (I'm running a PCIe NVMe SSD that averages 1600-2000MB/s for sequential writes/reads so this should be interesting)

All went well with the update as expect, nice to have a modern kernel running, clearly a lot quicker, boots in around half a second after the BIOS.

Points of note thus far:

- Unsure if EFI is supported?

- Seems to be no way to create templates

- Cannot import a single file OVF image

- Cannot clone a VM

- Cannot snapshot a VM

- While importing a VM, you can't access the main window to start / edit other VMs UPDATE: scratch that - you can - but it's slow as anything even with none of my computers resources maxed out, it appears to be single threaded and perhaps some locking is occuring on the GUI.

- DISCARD / TRIM SSD support works perfectly as expected, unlike in VMware.

Importing a Windows 10 shudder OVA _directory_ export from VMware Fusion worked perfectly and was quick to complete.

- After installing the guest addons which was very quick as they must be quite light weight, all drivers worked perfectly and performance seems good in general (for windows anyway), have not tested 3D yet.

- No native resolution scaling when resizing the VM window even after installing tools

_NOTE:_ I will turn this thread into a blog post and put it up on https://smcleod.net when I have time, perhaps this weekend.

Well, I'm excited by the potential of having something better than Virtualbox available for free.

I tried converting a linux vm I frequently use via vagrant just now, and it seems to work well except for network bridging: You can't bridge over wifi. Kindof a deal-breaker.

The relevant page[1] explains it thus: "Due to features of wireless protocol, level 2 bridges don’t work over Wi-Fi, and so you can’t use wireless interface of your Mac to route bridge traffic to external network – only among VMs and host."

[1] https://veertu.com/knowledgebase/vagrant-setup-instructions/

Makes sense, 802.11 isn't Ethernet.

So how is VirtualBox able to bridge over Wi-Fi?

Bridging to a wireless interface is done differently from bridging to a wired interface, because most wireless adapters do not support promiscuous mode. All traffic has to use the MAC address of the host's wireless adapter, and therefore VirtualBox needs to replace the source MAC address in the Ethernet header of an outgoing packet to make sure the reply will be sent to the host interface. When VirtualBox sees an incoming packet with a destination IP address that belongs to one of the virtual machine adapters it replaces the destination MAC address in the Ethernet header with the VM adapter's MAC address and passes it on. VirtualBox examines ARP and DHCP packets in order to learn the IP addresses of virtual machines.

https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/ch06.html#network_bridged

better than Virtualbox

Just take a look at VBoxManage --help for a crazy list of settings and features that VBox has accumulated during the past ~10 years.

It even supports ATA TRIM so your fs-driver can discard blocks and keep the VDI-file deflated at all times.

Performance-wise: Compiling stuff within VBox on an i7 quad-core (-j5) is almost as fast as native. X on Linux-VMs feels native too, especially when running in fullscreen.

Out of curiosity, have you tried anything other than VirtualBox (e.g. VMware Fusion)?

I was happy with VirtualBox's (on OS X) performance until I bought VMware Fusion. I didn't do any benchmarks so I don't have numbers to back up my claim but it definitely "felt" much faster than VirtualBox.

I never tried VMF so it may be faster, sure. The thing about VBox is, like I wrote, features. VBox is basically a full-featured Virtualization-Suite, has multiple UIs and an API. It is also available on Win7,8,10/macOS/Linux and Solaris.

You may add: excellent documentation and friendly support (board, irc, list).

If I'll ever have to switch, I'd first need feature-parity.

I just ran into this same issue (bridging over Wi-Fi) last night when setting up KVM on a laptop (running Ubuntu 16.04).

Apparently, this can be worked around using a TAP/TUN device but I haven't tried it yet. Perhaps a similar workaround is feasible on OS X/macOS.

I have a current `docker-compose`-based dev-setup, which I'd like to move out of Docker for Mac because of instability and into a Linux VM.

One dirty detail is that the Docker containers need to communicate with the host machine (the dev-Mac). Would this be achievable with the limited bridge that Veertu supports?

It should not be issue, host<->guest connection is full functional

I haven't tried it, but this has been around for a little while: https://github.com/zchee/docker-machine-driver-xhyve

> move out of Docker for Mac because of instability and into a Linux VM

Docker for Mac is a Linux VM, in (a fork of) xhyve which sits on top of the OSX hypervisor framework - the same thing backing Veertu.

Curious to the issues you're experiencing and if they disappear if you move to Veertu.

I wonder what are its benefits in comparison to an OSS solution https://github.com/mist64/xhyve Here's the link to the previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9690846

My understanding is that xhyve isn't a "click and go" solution for most users.

Also, Veertu Desktop is now free: https://github.com/veertuinc/vdhh

The README indicates that repo is not for the entire product, just part of it: “Veertu Desktop Hosted Hypervisor(VDHH) is the core hypervisor platform for Veertu Desktop product." “… but to achieve full set of features, it have to be launched by Veertu Desktop app.”

Yeah that part threw me too, but their website does say:

"We are making Veertu Desktop Open source. It will be available on https://github.com/veertuinc/vdhh and will continue to be developed and maintained."

Maybe a wording issue in the README, and the desktop app is intended to be open source and built from (the|another) repo too?

Hi, currently the hupervisor was opensourced, we are looking to open the ui and the vagrant plugin as well, the reason we didnt put the ui in that project was that wr beleived ot would be cleaner for the opensource community to have cli hypervisor project. the only part we might have issue to opensource is our windows drivers

Izik, now that you open-sourced it, why don't you say that it is based on QEMU? Everybody knew it was, and anybody could have asked Apple to pull your app from the store. It would be nice if you guys showed some appreciation for the fact that QEMU developers didn't do that right away.

We will be happy to give credit, let me contact you to see how to do this the best

Thanks!

Awesome! Was hoping something like this would come along — has anyone used this and can speak to their experience with it? In particular, what about graphics performance?

Just installed Debian with 1GB and 2 CPU, default settings. Runs smoothly and install was easy. Haven't dived into advanced use yet though :). Definitely promising!

Thanks for replying! Just to be clear, was this a text-only install, or a graphical/GNOME one? I'm not sure what Debian's defaults are.

Text only install. However I installed the GNOME desktop environment and it's working fine.

I bought the Veertu 2016 Business edition in april this year, with the intention of replacing VMWare Fusion, but it didn't work out for me. At the time the performance was great and it worked properly for the most part. Though some critical features were missing, such as copy/pasting files from and to the VM. Graphics performance was nowhere near VMWare performance the last time I used it. Reading their blog, "Listening, Growing and Adapting" apparently means taking 40,- from your users and cancelling your product 6 months later.

The product is all but canceled, it is in active development - adding features users asks for.

I'll gladly stand corrected... but where do I find the product then?

www.veertu.com click on the download button in the top right

That's the free version, not the business edition which I paid for in the app store.

The free version has all the paid features now.

I asked the authors on Twitter about this, they said they will be releasing related products soon that will cover their revenue stream.

And of course they'll grandfather in the people who paid for the now free product less than 6 months ago, right?

You'll have to ask them that. I got a pretty quick response on twitter, or there was a rep in this thread earlier

For some reason I can't answer your latest question in the bottom thread, but that is the full version, including everything.

It is actively developed and it is now distribute in different channel to support bridge networking and usb.

Doesn't even minimally support macOS guests. This makes Veertu mostly useless to me. Fusion support of macOS guests is pretty minimal but it does work.

How is support for this going to be funded? Will there be a commercial license which will pop up later? Paid features? It would be great to have some information.

I'm always leery of adopting a technology which will be fundamental to my work environment when I don't know how long it will be supported, or if I will have to change my use of it due to licensing issues.

The version that can run only images from their library is free-as-in-beer. The version that you can create your own VMs with, is paid.

This version support everything that was in the paid version, so you get it all for free.

Very cool! But what's the business model then?

This is very nice! HiDPI mode works perfectly for Windows 10 guest (unlike VirtualBox, which has weird graphic issues).

Unfortunately macOS Hypervisor.Framework does not support USB devices (https://veertu.com/knowledgebase/usb-support/), which makes Veertu useless to me, as the only reason I use Windows VM is to attach stupid USB tokens for certain banking use cases.

We now support usb, try it. Note that we have a bug that make it work only with mass stirage device, but we will release fix soon.

Are you intending to offer a shared clipboard? That is quite useful for running a guest OS with a GUI...

There is copy paste tools both for windows and linux

Ah, I see the option now, which appears to be on by default. The test VM I just set up (a clean install from ubuntu-gnome-16.04-desktop-amd64.iso) doesn't copy or paste from host to guest or vice versa. I would be happy to log an issue in Github, is there any debug info I should provide?

I reached out to get their unreleased fix for this, after combing through the knowledgebase[1] and it works! Overall it performs a little better than Virtualbox in general for me, so far.

1: https://veertu.com/knowledgebase/copypaste-linux-vms/

That's awesome! Couldn't wait for the fix. Plz release soon! :)

I use this on my mac as well. Runs as good or better than virtual box or vmwares offerings.

No support for storing VMs on an external drive? Not even symlinking seems to work (VMs don't get saved to the list).

Have you checked so it's not a user permission issue?

I just had an idea: What if the hypervisor framework prepares macOS to add a future compatibility layer to run apps on X64 and ARM. "Like" a new version of Rosetta (PowerPC on X86). But now maybe you can run iOS apps on macOS (you probably could do this with BitCode ?)

Hypervisor.framework only exposes X86 virtualization and Intel VT-d to the user space. It does not allow for the emulation of any other architecture.

The Verge have speculated [1] that the new Touch Bar found in the latest MBPs is a gateway to running iOS apps natively, with no emulation.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13454052/apple-macbook-pr...

Almost certainly wrong. Someone's imbibing far too much what-if-juice.

I know gaming is not the main pull of this, but would this be better than parallels and fusion for gaming?

I don't think they have accelerated 3D graphics, so probably not. Unless you play 2D games, of course :)

yeah, they don't look to have support for the graphics drivers like parallels does, but for some older games that just need a lightweight Windows VM to run on, it'd be fine. If it gets more active development, I'm sure it can grow, but the idea seems to be using macOS's native hypervisor function instead.

If you're going to install a 2nd OS on your Mac for gaming purposes (where you want as much performance as possible) you might as well just dual boot it with BootCamp.

I've not used this before, but it sounds like it's fast, but you'll still have the overhead of running 2 OS's at the same time.

Nah, for that you really want to use BootCamp (native installed Windows). You can then use Parallels or VMWare Fusion to import it as a VM to be used inside of macOS or reboot fully to Windows to get full hardware performance.

I can recommend Wine (Staging, with the command stream patch) if you don't want to dual boot to run games. It's quite amazing how fast it is now. In some games you can have close to native performance.

Site's down - here's the download link: https://d2sje6b9huarvp.cloudfront.net/VeertuDesktop.dmg

Heads up, site is up again right now.

Anyone know if this interacts OK with Docker beta? that uses xhyve as well, so before I install both I'd like to make sure nothing breaks.

yea, it is working togather

If you hit any issues on the Docker side, let us know on the support forums and we'll fix it.

Veertu looks interesting and very lightweight. Can someone help me understand how it relates to the Docker for Mac beta app?

Why would I switch from VirtualBox ?

In theory? Veertu uses the built-in Hypervisor.framework from macOS, so it can run without installing a kernel extension. I think they're still working on building out features, but for my basic needs I prefer it on that basis alone.

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