Virtualization, Linux labs on Apple Silicon

2023-07-17 20:18:00

I've held off on spending money on a new Mac for a long, long time. I have two Macbook Airs from 2017, which are still holding up admirably for my studies and work. Honestly, their 8GB of RAM and aged i5 are still plenty good for most of my work. 

Sure, I did get an Asus laptop with a beefy Ryzen in there, for teaching purposes. But even that's an ultra-portable and nothing hugely expensive. 

I've had to bite the bullet though: the chances of me getting students with Apple Silicon laptops are growing. My current group at ITVitae has my first one and it's a matter of time before a commercial customer pops in with an M1 or M2. 

So, I got myself a second hand 2020 M1 Mac Mini from Mac Voor Minder. Good store, I'd highly recommend. 

I had hoped that, in the three years we've had the Apple Silicon systems out, virtualization would be a solved problem. Well... it's not really, if you want one of the big names. 

VirtualBox, forget about that. It's highly in beta and is useless. VMWare Fusion supposedly works, but I didn't manage to get it to do anything for me. And I'm not paying for Parallels, because most likely my students won't either! I need cheap/free solutions.

Turns out there's two.

  1. UTM, which uses Qemu under the hood. It's brilliant. Looks spiffy, has good options and does both virtualization (aarch64) and emulation (many other architectures). It does not have an API and it does not work with Vagrant. But I love it. 
  2. You can also install Qemu via Homebrew and then use the Vagrant-Qemu plugin to build VMs. It works well, although it doesn't support all great Vagrant options yet. One downside is that the amount of aarch64 images for Qemu on VagrantUp is small. 

I'm now rewriting the lab files for my classes, to make them work on M1/M2 ARM systems. I'm starting with the lab VM for my DevSecOps class and then moving onward to two small projects that I use in class. Updating my Linux+ class will take more work.

Maybe I should start making my own Vagrant box images. :)


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