10 ms·
Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)
- kylec 6mo agoThis is a very silly restriction, at least to apply uniformly to all Macs. I think if you buy a more powerful Mac they should let you virtualize more Mac instances. Like an M5 maybe limit to 2, but maybe let an M5 Pro do 4 and an M5 Max do 8 or something.
- benoau 6mo agoWhy should they impose a limit at all? Your hardware is a natural limit, you'll stop of your own accord when you reach its thresholds.
- naikrovek 6mo agoThey are likely scared of people who would run MacOS virtual desktop farms, without also buying an appropriate number of Apple machines. That’s what I would be worried about if my primary source of income was hardware sales.
- ryandrake 6mo agoApple had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the world of virtualization and the idea of macOS running on anything besides "metal built by Apple." They've been pretty clear for decades that they only care about customers who buy Apple aluminum and silicon.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- woodson 6mo agoWell, but their customers are those that buy Apple hardware.
- moondev 6mo agoImagine buying a mac studio with 500+ GB of memory and being limited to 2 vms.
- FireBeyond 6mo agoThey discontinued the 512GB Studio, and the Pro is gone, so no fear there now.
- naikrovek 6mo agoThey still EXIST though. And I saw one the other day on the Refurbished store. They’re definitely still around. Even a 256GB model would run a load of 16GB VMs
- naikrovek 6mo agoYeah that is what I was going to do until I discovered the two VM limit. I was building a MacOS GitHub Actions farm, or rather, looking into it. I had written most of the code but my inertia screeched to a halt when I discovered the two VM limit for MacOS VMs.
- stephenr 6mo agoYou realise you can run VMs for any other os right? It's a limit on running macOS not a limit on running VMs.
- naikrovek 6mo ago
- mysteria 6mo agoIMO they should sell appropriately priced licenses that allow the use of more VMs. Make the licenses expensive enough so that it doesn't eat into hardware sales, or explicitly prohibit VDI/virtual seats in the license agreement. Currently services like Github Actions painfully and inefficiently rack thousands of Mac Minis and run 2 VMs on each to stay within the limits. They probably wouldn't mind paying a fee to run more VMs on Mac Studios instead.
- matheusmoreira 6mo agoRent seeking, of course. They want to charge you for every physical and logical machine you use. Virtualization gets around that. They'd probably charge separately for every feature of the processor if they could.
- JoshTriplett 6mo agoThat would make more sense except they don't even have an option to pay for it.
- VanTheBrand 6mo agoThe option is you have to buy another machine. There are mac ec2 instances and several mac cloud hosts that all would abuse this if they could, instead to stay compliant they buy more machines.
- JoshTriplett 6mo agoAnd thus they need a massive datacenter full of systems, rather than a pile of paid licenses. And macOS remains a toy for use only by individuals that is a massive pain for developers to support.
- benoau 6mo ago(where "abuse" means using the hardware to run software)
- leptons 6mo agoI tried to launch a MacOS instance on EC2 recently (on my work account), and was blocked. So I asked the IT dept and they said it's stupidly expensive to run a MacOS instance on EC2, and that they would just send me a Macbook Pro instead. I wish I were kidding.
- thealistra 6mo agoYou should be happy that you have such a financially aware IT dept. The machines are truly expensive and after managing a farm of 150 Mac minis at work I can tell why. It is like 3 days running the EC2 buys you a Mac mini? And you can only rent the machine in day increments
- isodev 6mo ago> Your hardware Ah but when you buy an iPhone or a Mac, Apple sees it as their hardware graciously made available to you for a limited time and under ToS.
- m463 6mo ago> Why should they impose a limit at all? Whenever I see apple silliness, I have to remember: "You're not the target market."
- colechristensen 6mo agoMarket design. They don't want to be in the server business, they don't want there to be third party VM providers running Mac farms selling oversubscribed giving underpowered disappointing VM experiences to users who will complain. A bunch of folks want Apple to enter a market Apple doesn't want to enter into. They have tools available which would enable that market which they are kneecapping on purpose so that nobody unwillingly enters them into it. The "two VMs per unit hardware" has been in their license for at least a decade.
- leptons 6mo ago>The "two VMs per unit hardware" has been in their license for at least a decade. I'd be pretty surprised if there isn't a workaround or hack for this. Microsoft has had limits on some things like RDP on some versions of Windows, but there have always been ways to get around it.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- marmarama 6mo agoSure you can do it technically, but then you have a licensing compliance issue, so no reputable business will do it. You can run x86 macOS VMs in Windows or Linux too with a little bit of technical trickery, but again, you end up with a license issue, so no-one reputable does it.
- leptons 6mo agoI've never really understood how Apple can let people download MacOS for free, and then tell them where and how they can run it - only on Apple's hardware. If I download a copy of Windows or any software ever written, I can run it on any hardware that exists that can run it. But somehow Apple gets to dictate to people where and how they can run freely available software that anyone can download?
- 6mo ago
- fsckboy 6mo ago>Why should they impose a limit at all? Your hardware is a natural limit because imposing an artificial limit keeps them from exposing how low the natural limits turn out to be? Apple Silicon need always to be spoken with reverence, ye brother of the faith, do not fuel the faithless lest they rend and threadrip that which we've made of wholecloth.
- lxgr 6mo agoBecause this limit isn’t about your hardware, but their software. As appropriate a model this still is in the development VM scenario, you still need a valid license for each operating system copy you run. Microsoft will sell you these individually; Apple apparently implicitly grants you up to three per Mac that you buy, and won’t let you pay for any more even if you want to. In other words, what’s limited here is not really the hypervisor itself, but rather the “license granting component” that passes through the implicit permission to run macOS, but only up to some limit.
- egorfine 6mo ago> Your hardware They see it a bit differently.
- whatsupdog 6mo ago[flagged]
- bdcravens 6mo agoThe limit isn't really a resource issue, since you can run pretty much an "unlimited" number of non-Mac VMs. I suspect it's more of a business decision, such as preventing people from setting up shop as a low-cost Mac VPS provider.
- fortran77 6mo agoMaybe it doesn't work. Why are you so sure it would? It may perform very badly.
- leptons 6mo agoBut aren't Mx based macs supposed to be the fastest computers you can get? Why wouldn't they be able to run more than 2 VMs? I can run a ton of Windows VMs at the same time, wouldn't Windows be a comparable resource hog to MacOS? Apple M2 CPUs can have up to 192GB of RAM. If we look at the Mac Neo that has only 8GB of RAM, then an M2 host should be able to run at least 20 VMs before memory gets scarce. There's no good reason Apple limits to 2 VMs except for greed, which they are well known for.
- bdcravens 6mo agoI've run multiple Windows VMs as well as multiple Docker sessions at the same time on different MBPs (my current one being an M3 Max). Didn't really budge the machine at all.
- fortran77 6mo agoI buy a $100 Windows 11 Pro licence, and my limit is 1024 VMs Hyper‑V on Windows 11 supports up to 1024 simultaneous VMs per host if the hardware can handle it. On my little Windows ARM laptop I can easily run 4 VMs before it runs out of steam.
- kylec 6mo agoThe limit of 2 is just for virtualizing macOS. You can run as many Linux VMs as you want at once on macOS.
- fortran77 6mo agoThere's first class support for Linux on Windows, and Microsoft has a developers VM available for download so you can run as many Windows as you want. I do a Hyper-V Quick Create and there are three flavors of Linux to choose from, or Windows, with all the development tools pre-installed.
- colechristensen 6mo agoThe only reason Linux exists on Windows is they're trying to redo the 90s playbook of dominating then destroying the competition. I was almost on board in the Windows 10 era, switching a whole lot of my time to doing things in WSL on Windows. Windows 11 and the walled garden greed they're trying to enable is so bad that this dominating Linux attempt is certainly failing, the only reason I haven't completely ditched my Windows system is that my several TB external drive is at large and I haven't taken the time to actually do it. Plus Steam and their Wine work is absolutely killing it so the one thing that was keeping me motivated to still have a Windows presence is pretty much gone.
- oxfeed65261 6mo agoOn Mac, you can run lots of Windows/Linux VMs and two Mac VMs. On Windows, you can run lots of Windows/Linux VMs and zero Mac VMs.
- 6mo ago
- namelosw 6mo agoIt really is silly. The other day I decided to try this openclaw thing out but concerned about the security stuff, so I took VM for a spin only to find out the iCloud and the App Store were restricted.
- tomaskafka 6mo agoRemember you’re not battling against a HW limitation, but against Tim Cook’s fear of selling less macs.
- RestartKernel 6mo agoThis is a really cool article, but the existence of such an arbitrary limit on any serious development platform is weird.
- tempest_ 6mo agoHas apple been a serious development platform in the last 20 years? I know a lot of devs like apple hardware because it is premium but OSX has always been "almost linux" controlled by a company that cares more about itunes then it does the people using their hardware to develop.
- thomascountz 6mo agoAnything being developed for the Apple ecosystem requires use of the Apple development platform. Maybe the scope could be called "unserious," but the scale cannot be ignored.
- tempest_ 6mo agoI am aware. However having used Xcode at some point 10 years ago my belief is that the app ecosystem exists in spite of that and that people would never choose this given the choice.
- amelius 6mo agoIt is a weird situation. Apple products are consumer products but they make us use them as development hardware because there is no other way to make software for those products.
- BoorishBears 6mo agoMaking software for other Apple products pretty low on the reasons I use a MBP. 128GB of RAM and an M4 Max makes for a very solid development machine, and the build quality is a nice bonus.
- 6mo ago
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- obilgic 6mo agoCan this work with lume as well? Currently it has a similar limitation.
- czk 6mo agoit should, lume is a thin wrapper around Apple's Virtualization.framework as i understand it
- Khalid_nowaf 6mo agoI’m very curious, why did Apple put such a limitation?
- cluckindan 6mo agoProbably to prevent a single hardware system from being used to run an online identity farm.
- mschuster91 6mo agoDoesn't make too much sense, the VMs don't get unique hardware identifiers that one could (ab)use for spamming iMessage.
- junofan 6mo agoThat kind of tracks as the source of the concern. My first thought was it’d be something IDMS-related as well. I don’t know enough about that system to pinpoint exactly what.
- ralph84 6mo agoBecause their business model is to sell tightly integrated hardware and software as a package. The hardware sales fund the software development. They don't want people who haven't bought the hardware using the software.
- benoau 6mo agoYeah but the "hardware" in that sense is almost entirely iPhone and iPhone-adjacent, Mac is a trailing 4th- or 5th-place line of business... maybe 6th.
- moondev 6mo agoThe VM limit only applies to the number of macOS VMs launched from macOS itself. My 2018 mac mini officially supports VMware ESXi to be installed directly on the hardware and virtualize any number of macOS machines Funny enough I can even launch more than 2 macOS vms on my framework chromebook with qemu + KVM from the integrated Linux terminal.
- czk 6mo agostarting with M3+ you can use Hypervisor.framework/Virtualization.framework to spin up nested VMs. it would be amusing if that bypassed the limit.
- jonnrb 6mo agoLol with 2 VMs per VM you can do an infinite VM linked list where each macOS hosts a "guest" and a "next host". I'm too lazy to test this out. Any takers?
- colechristensen 6mo agoI think it's a little funny that my response is "no I'm not wasting my weekly tokens on that, it's not a good enough bit"
- bradfitz 6mo agoIIRC, that's only for Linux guests that can nest. macOS can only one level deep. That is: you can't have a macOS guest (running on the Apple hardware host) make its own macOS guest.
- ab_testing 6mo agoVery funny to see HN hate on Microsoft and Google but then love a company where they cannot even run an app on their mobile platform without Apple's permission or only a certain number of VMs on the hardware they own .
- dghlsakjg 6mo agoSince when are users in this place shy about bashing Apple? Plenty of hate out there of apple alongside the love.
- Barbing 6mo agoIn the very same comments sometimes, those frustrating geniuses
- RealityVoid 6mo agoAdults can hold 2 thoughts in their head at their same time.
- skygazer 6mo agoParaphrasing F. Scott Fitzgerald? "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." Holding contradictory ideas isn't the laudable skill. Any uncritical person can believe conflicting things without being troubled by them. The genius is holding such ideas in disbelief long enough to let evidence alter or evict them.
- RealityVoid 6mo agoI agree that holding inconsistent thoughts is not desirable. I don't think the thoughts in this case need to be contradictory and many times are not. I, personally, admire the HW they design and the polish that Apple delivers, while hating how closed their platform is. Am I contradicting myself? I did not know F. Scott Fitzgerald was the source of the phrase, TIL. I just picked it up somewhere and paraphrased it since I thought it applies here.
- edude03 6mo agoIIRC you can just turn off sip and set the boot argument that controls it without a custom kernel
- urbandw311er 6mo agoThis feels like an underrated comment if true
- rayiner 6mo agoIt’s crazy that you can compile a custom kernel and it’ll boot and the GUI will run.
- jadar 6mo ago> When using a custom kernel collection with Apple Silicon, there are some unfortunate downsides. The biggest being that streamlined OS updates are no longer available. This might be a blessing in disguise.
- dvrp 6mo agoSeems Mykola Grymalyuk started working at Apple 2 years after this blog post. You either die a hero..
- mrweasel 6mo agoApple has a 2 VM limit?
- indigomm 6mo ago2 MacOS VMs due to licencing. You can run as many VMs with other guest OSs as you want.
- erichocean 6mo agoAnother limitation: only five active user accounts (with UIs) per machine.
- iririririr 6mo ago[dead]