Favourite hypervisor for a macOS host?

[cpach]

Dear fellow Mac users,

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

[toast0]

I was happiest with xhyve https://github.com/machyve/xhyve

Serial console in terminal was nice (for me!), network configuration was trash (I think I was able to set the subnet by fiddling around with system plists? and it would revert from time to time), and I didn't have to deal with Virtualbox. I've been away from macs for a while, I don't know if xhyve works on the M1, but it might. I ran a FreeBSD vm so I could run my server code on my laptop in an environment that was like production but slower.

[wdb]

Pretty happy with VMWare Fusion much better than Parallel's. But I am biased as a Parallel update once zapped my macOS installation while living abroad and spend a long journey on busses (didn't drive) to get to an Apple Premium Reseller to get install disc

[cpach → wdb]

Ouch… That must’ve been incredibly irritating.

Any other things you’ve found where Fusion beats Parallels?

[wdb → cpach]

I can't really say I haven't really tried Parallels since that experience. In the past I likeed the idea that I can share VM images with VMWare Workstation colleagues. At my work back then Parallels wasn't popular under the Windows-based developers

[ackatz]

I've tried Parallels and VMware Fusion on an M1 chip with the former being a more polished and fluid experience. It's been around six months since I tried Fusion, but would be interested to know from others what kinds of progress has been made since then.

[cpach → ackatz]

Yeah it seems to me that Parallels is the best choice currently.

I’m a bit nervous that the owner (Corel) will not put so much effort into developing the product further, but we’ll see about that.

I think UTM and/or QEMU are very interesting options, but they’re not mature yet.