Favourite hypervisor for a macOS host?
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