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

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

#121

Post by charcircuit »

gambiting wrote: post #33
jaredklewis wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least 9 out of every 10 software engineers I know does all their development on a mac. Because this sample is from my experience, it’s skewed to startups and tech companies. For sure, lots of devs outside those areas, but tech companies are a big chunk of the world’s developers. So yea I would say Apple is a “serious development platform” just given how much it dominates software development in the tech sector in…

>>At least 9 out of every 10 software engineers I know does all their development on a mac I work in video games, you know, industry larger than films - 10 out of 10 devs I know are on Windows. I have a work issued Mac just to do some iOS dev and I honestly don't understand how anyone can use it day to day as their main dev machine, it's just so restrictive in what the OS allows you to do.

>it's just so restrictive in what the OS allows you to do.

The people using them typically aren't being paid to customize their OS. The OS is good for if you just want to get stuff done and don't want to worry about the OS.

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

#122

Post by moondev »

BoorishBears wrote: post #78
amelius wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It 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.

Making 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.

An artificial limit on the number vms you are allowed to launch doesn't make it solid

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

#123

Post by leptons »

stingraycharles wrote: post #106
jonnrb wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they do. It's called "another Mac". And I'm not even being snarky here: I legitimately think someone at Apple thought this through and said "yeah if they need more than 2 VMs running at the same time, there are probably multiple users and they can each get their own Mac".

Nah, Apple has been extremely restrictive about virtual machines in all kinds of ways, e.g. the minimum terms anyone is able to lease out a VM or Mac to someone else is 24h, making cloud-like workloads practically impossible. For some reason, Apple really doesn’t like virtual machines, and it’s much more intentional than just “probably multiple users”. It’s extremely frustrating.

Frustrating for you, hilarious for me. I had no idea they had hobbled MacOS in this way. It doesn't surprise me at all really, and it's pretty ridiculous.

I'm not sure why people keep giving Apple their money, especially tech-savvy people that would want to run VMs.

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

#124

Post by leptons »

VanTheBrand wrote: post #96
JoshTriplett wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would make more sense except they don't even have an option to pay for it .

The 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.

I 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.

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

#125

Post by leptons »

naikrovek wrote: post #86
moondev wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine buying a mac studio with 500+ GB of memory and being limited to 2 vms.

Yeah 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.

You are not Apple's target market, and never will be.

They don't care what you want to do with the hardware you own.

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

#126

Post by leptons »

colechristensen wrote: post #109
benoau wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why 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.

Market 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 nobod…

>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.

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

#127

Post by leptons »

fortran77 wrote: post #116
bdcravens wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 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.

Maybe it doesn't work. Why are you so sure it would? It may perform very badly.

But 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.

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

#128

Post by spockz »

moondev wrote: post #117
plorkyeran wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Apple's not going to come after you for running too many VMs on your personal machine, but if you're running a commercial enterprise involving macOS VMs they do care.

VMware vSphere is not a product intended to be used by consumers. It's intended to be run by enterprises at scale. ESXi is running the vms not macOS. https://i0.wp.com/williamlam.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/...

Yes. And the license only allows you to run macOS guests on macOS hosts. So using esxi means you don’t have any license for whatever macOS guests you run.

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

#129

Post by jdejean »

m463 wrote: post #101
benoau wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why 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.

> Why should they impose a limit at all? Whenever I see apple silliness, I have to remember: "You're not the target market."

Yeah but. They happily sold it to you

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

#130

Post by [deleted] »

leptons wrote: post #126
colechristensen wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market 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 nobod…

>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]
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