Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#1

Post by krackers » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 8:58 PM UTC

Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)
khronokernel.com

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#2

Post by kylec » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 9:24 PM UTC

This 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.

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#3

Post by RestartKernel » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 9:28 PM UTC

This is a really cool article, but the existence of such an arbitrary limit on any serious development platform is weird.

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#4

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 9:30 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#5

Post by obilgic » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 9:32 PM UTC

Can this work with lume as well? Currently it has a similar limitation.

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#6

Post by tempest_ » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 9:34 PM UTC

RestartKernel wrote: post #3

This is a really cool article, but the existence of such an arbitrary limit on any serious development platform is weird.

Has 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.

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#7

Post by Khalid_nowaf » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 9:34 PM UTC

I’m very curious, why did Apple put such a limitation?

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#8

Post by czk » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 9:38 PM UTC

starting with M3+ you can use Hypervisor.framework/Virtualization.framework to spin up nested VMs.

it would be amusing if that bypassed the limit.

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#9

Post by cluckindan » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 9:38 PM UTC

Khalid_nowaf wrote: post #7

I’m very curious, why did Apple put such a limitation?

Probably to prevent a single hardware system from being used to run an online identity farm.

Re: Apple Silicon and Virtual Machines: Beating the 2 VM Limit (2023)

#10

Post by czk » Sat, Apr 11, 2026, 9:42 PM UTC

obilgic wrote: post #5

Can this work with lume as well? Currently it has a similar limitation.

it should, lume is a thin wrapper around Apple's Virtualization.framework as i understand it