Vagrant with Macbook Mx (arm64)

Managing VMs with Vagrant + QEMU on arm64 Macbooks

For most local development workflows, Docker, is often the preferred tooling, but there sometimes are need to run a full virtual machine, ideally with popular tooling like Vagrant, which can manage virtual machines, connectivity, as well as provisioning the system with scripts or a tool like Ansible.

On new Macbooks M1/M2/M3, that comes with arm64 processor, this is not so straightforward. This article covers a few quick steps where you can use QEMU to run virtual machines with either arm64 virtual machines using Apple’s hypervisor, or use a emulator to run amd64 virtual machines.

Requirements

• Operating System: macOS 12.6.3 or higher
• Hardware: Apple M1 or newer generation
• Software: Homebrew for installing packages

Tools Installed

• QEMU 8.2.1
• Vagrant 2.4.1
• Vagrant vagrant-qemu plugin 0.3.5

Installation

The initial steps will be to get the virtual machine solution (QEMU) and install Vagrant with the QEMU plugin:

# install VM solution
brew install qemu

# install Vagrant with QEMU support
brew install --cask vagrant
vagrant plugin install vagrant-qemu

Configure and Launch arm64 image

Afterward, set up a Vagrant configuration file, download the VM image, start the virtual machine, and log into the VM.

# create configuration file for arm64 vm image
cat <<EOF > Vagrantfile
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "perk/ubuntu-2204-arm64"
end
EOF

# download and startup VM using hvf
vagrant up --provider=qemu

# log into the VM
vagrant ssh

This will use virtualization with the the native hypervisor built into the macOS.

Testing the virtual machine (arm64)

Once inside you can install inxi and neofetch:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install -y inxi neofetch

Then test with using neofetch:

And test the environment by running with inxi by typing:

inxi --system --machine -- cpu -- network --disk --info

You should see something like this:

Configure and Launch x86 image

The default settings for vagrant-qemu plugin will not work for running Intel based images, so we’ll have to make some adjustments to the Vagrant configuration (Vagrantfile).

Run this in a separate directory to keep configurations for amd64 and arm64 separated.

📓 NOTE: If you are using the same directory, you’ll need to run vagrant destroy to clean up the previous virtual machine.

cat <<EOF > Vagrantfile
Vagrant.configure("2") do |config|
  config.vm.box = "generic/ubuntu2204"
  config.vm.provider "qemu" do |qe|
    qe.arch = "x86_64"
    qe.machine = "q35"
    qe.cpu = "max"
    qe.net_device = "virtio-net-pci"
    qe.ssh_port = "50023"
  end
end
EOF

# download and startup VM using q35 emulator
vagrant up --provider=qemu

# log into the VM
vagrant ssh

Here’s is a break down of some of the setting changes:

• arch: specify x86_64 (intel) to run amd64 images.
• machine: default is virt,accel=hvf,highmem=on, which uses built-in hypervisor on the macOS. For x64_64, we’ll need to use the emulator, so use q35.
• cpu: default is home, change this to max.
• net_device: the default virtio-net-device will not work as there is no virtio-bus with the emulator. Change this to virtio-net-pci.
• ssh_port: the default is 50022, so we need to change to another port. Run lsof -nP -iTCP:50022 to see the if the port is in use.

Testing with the emulator (x86_64)

Once inside you can install inxi and neofetch:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt install -y inxi neofetch

Then test with using neofetch:

And test the environment by running with inxi by typing:

inxi --system --machine -- cpu -- network --disk --info

You should see something like this:

Resources

Articles

These are articles that I have come across when researching this.

• ARM64 VM on macOS with libvirt + QEMU
• Vagrant QEMU on Apple Silicon
• ARM64 VM on macOS with libvirt + QEMU

Vagrant Boxen

• Vagrant Box generic/ubuntu2204
• https://app.vagrantup.com/perk/boxes/ubuntu-2204-arm64

Other

• https://gist.github.com/eduardomp/1d54b1f6cc059d6ad885fc6d8af45eca

Conclusion

That’s all there is to this. The tool QEMU has been around for a long time, and supports a variety of emulators for different processors and supports native virtualization. On macOS, virtualization default is Hypervisor Framework (hvf), and on Linux, KVM is supported. The QEMU tool has always been common tool to manage both emulators and a variety of virtualization solutions.

For those not familiar with Vagrant, this is a tool that manages virtual machines through a single intuitive interface command-line interface and configuration file called Vagrantfile. Vagrant also automates connections to the virtual machine, such as ssh, and provisioning the virtual machine using scripts, change configuration such as Ansible, or containers with tools like Docker.

The plugin for Vagrant vagrant-qemu is a wrapper for the qemu command line tool. With this, you can download images that support qemu from https://app.vagrantup.com.