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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)

#151

Post by marmarama »

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.

Sure 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.

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

#154

Post by tomaskafka »

kylec wrote: post #2

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.

Remember you’re not battling against a HW limitation, but against Tim Cook’s fear of selling less macs.

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

#155

Post by cowboylowrez »

leptons wrote: post #123
stingraycharles wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

yeah I'm glad I paid extra for linux on a used dell, I'd hate to be slumming in some poverty ridden ghetto like mac users with their vm limits

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

#157

Post by stingraycharles »

monocasa wrote: post #135
stingraycharles wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean, as someone who was in that situation as a customer, we couldn't find a great cloud option for our needs, and we ended up building our first hardware lab with a bunch of macs. It definitely caused us to buy macs we would have rented and shared.

Correct, us as well, but we’re mainly harvesting refurbished Mac Mini’s.

My biggest problem is the lack of a good CI/CD flow when you can’t work with images and virtual machines. We’re using ansible now to manage the fleet and I’m not a fan.

If they would more than 2 VMs, we’d still buy the hardware, we’d just buy larger ones and have more virtual machines on them. Very likely also use Linux as the host.

I hope one day Apple sees the light like Microsoft also did, but I’m not hopeful.

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

#158

Post by stingraycharles »

leptons wrote: post #123
stingraycharles wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because we have customers that use macOS and both x86 and apple silicon are build targets of ours.

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

#159

Post by ericmay »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #107
ericmay wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re just living under the illusion of freedom. You are completely dependent on the decisions of others and their good graces for all of your computing needs, from the silicon to the Linux distro you use. You’re just drawing an arbitrary line a little further to feel like you’re in control, but you’re not.

Silicon? Sure. Billion dollar fabs are huge single points of failure. It's turning into a problem too due to the war on general purpose computing. Free software doesn't matter if we can't run it. Linux distro? Not really. It's only a matter of how much effort I want to put into things. I can make my own distro, I can't make my own trillion dollar fab. Anyway, what even is this argument? Can't control everything, so i…

You're trying to assert this big claim about freedom because some users can't I guess run more than 2 VMs on their MacBook Pro. Since we don't care we're not trying, we just gave up, we're serfs even. Well you're still a serf too your bounds of serfdom are just long enough to trick you into believing otherwise.

Who cares? I don't. I can't do anything with open source software either - like I'm going to spend hundreds or thousands of hours figuring our how any given software package works and that's going to somehow make me more free? C'mon. I can't tell Apple no anymore than I can tell someone maintaining a Linux distribution no.

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

#160

Post by stephenr »

leptons wrote: post #123
stingraycharles wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I run up to a dozen Linux VMs at once on my Macs.

I've never hit the referenced limit because it isn't a limit on running VMs it's a limit on running macOS, and I hardly ever run macOS VMs.

I'm not sure why people don't use Mac's are so obsessed with telling people who do use Macs that they're wrong, and yet here we are.

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