Installing Vagrant on Apple Silicon Macs (M1, M1X, etc)

NOTES.md

VirtualBox only supports the x86 platform, so the default installation instructions for Vagrant does not work on Apple silicon. Thankfully Vagrant has a VMWare Provider (more on providers here), and so if I can get VMWare running on my M1 MacBook, I should be able to run Vagrant as well!

These are my notes during figuring this out.

Get the VMWare Tech Preview released in September 2021!

We are in luck, as VMWare released this just a few weeks ago.

• See their blog entry
• register on their site to get an account
• download and install

Installed VMWare provider

• Followed instructions https://www.vagrantup.com/docs/providers/vmware
• Installed Vagrant vmware Utility

Setup basic Ubuntu image (failed)

vagrant init hashicorp/bionic64

$ vagrant up --provider vmware_desktop
Vagrant encountered an unexpected communications error with the
Vagrant VMware Utility driver. Please try to run the command
again. If this error persists, please contact support@hashicorp.com

Need to update this with the info from hashicorp/vagrant-vmware-desktop#22 (comment).

In essence: someone got it working :)

For people who are looking to how get it working: Here's the gist by sbailliez which worked for me.

Just need to rename application from 'VMware Fusion Tech Preview.app' to 'VMware Fusion.app' to fix mentioned issue. Other issues will (may) occur after that first fix.

Try vagrant-qemu, a simple provider plugin using QEMU directly.

Just saying that Canonical's Multipass works on Apple M1 with no hacks required, does basically the same stuff (but worse), and is easy to set up

It seems like virtualbox is now supporting to run on M1 chips.

@h3ct0rjs Links to that? Thought I read it would only ever be X86. But maybe they went the Rosetta route?

@fatso83 https://osxdaily.com/2022/10/22/you-can-now-run-virtualbox-on-apple-silicon-m1-m2/ you can download the dev version from the website, in my case I recently move to a M1 chip, I use this with vagrant all the time but I’m currently checking if this works

@h3ct0rjs Does it work? I didn't manage to make vagrant-virtualbox bundle work, I get VERR_UNSUPPORTED_CPU

@asmild it works for me on M1. VirtualBox 7 beta: https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads, I have Vagrant 2.3.4 and no plugins, yet.

I can spin up an arm based ubuntu 22 VM, but I'm getting some other errors. VMWare has always been a little ahead of the curve on macOS VMs. I'm hoping Fusion comes out of beta soon.

Just incase you stabled upon this thread, here is a quote from November 2022 by a Virtual box moderator on their forum:

VirtualBox is not and never has been an ARM hypervisor. The M1/M2 developer preview relies on an Intel code simulator module to run x86 (32bit) single core guests. Incredibly slowly. It's currently more of a toy than a serious solution to any problem.

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=107344#p528167

There's a much newer version of the tech preview https://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2023/07/vmware-fusion-2023-tech-preview.html

@p2made I would hope so, it has been two years since I posted 😸

This has been working for quite a long time now. Thanks for the updated link! I won't update the original post anyhow, to not invalidate later stuff.

Try vagrant-qemu, a simple provider plugin using QEMU directly.

but it doesn't support multiple interfaces

@fatso83 https://osxdaily.com/2022/10/22/you-can-now-run-virtualbox-on-apple-silicon-m1-m2/ you can download the dev version from the website, in my case I recently move to a M1 chip, I use this with vagrant all the time but I’m currently checking if this works

but it doesn't work with arm64 boxes

In case someone was looking for the latest Fusion download - they make it impossible: https://softwareupdate.vmware.com/cds/vmw-desktop/fusion/13.6.2/24409261/universal/core/com.vmware.fusion.zip.tar