Is there a way to run a macOS guest virtual machine on an M1 / Apple Silicon host?

Solution 1:

The macOS guest on top of macOS host running ARM hardware is supported officially by parallels with Monterey v12.

• https://www.parallels.com/eu/products/desktop/resources/

Previously on Big Sur, there were five OS guest options with Parallels:

1. Windows 10 on ARM Insider Preview
2. Ubuntu 20.10, 20.04
3. Fedora Workstation 33-1.2
4. Debian GNU/Linux 10.7
5. Kali Linux 2021.1

Of those, Windows and Linux ARM OS ran on Apple Silicon (M1).

• https://www.vmware.com/products/fusion.html

The VMware Fusion hypervisor doesn’t officially support Apple Silicon (M1) guest yet.

Solution 2:

The Apple Silicon M1 processor was released alongside macOS 11 Big Sur, but I never found any product or technique claiming to support that macOS version.

The VMware Fusion team described the situation early on as:

macOS VMs are not in scope in the short term. There are challenges there which will require Apple to work with us to resolve.

A contributor to the open source macOS/iOS UTM app described the [/one?] challenge as:

there is no [option to present M1 hardware directly to the VM] available in macOS Big Sur. It is coming in the next release of macOS, Monterey, later this year

And indeed with Monterey, the ARM-based macOS VM story has been changing:

1. An open-source proof of concept appeared for an M1 guest on an M1 host (step-by-step walkthrough at e.g. https://mrmacintosh.com/you-can-now-virtualize-macos-on-an-m1-mac-with-macos-monterey/).
2. Parallels now has a knowledge base article ("Last Review: Oct 22, 2021") covering how to Install macOS Monterey 12 virtual machine on a Mac with Apple M1 chip.
3. The developers of the UTM app have hinted that they are working on support for M1 macOS virtualization in an unreleased dev-monterey branch of their codebase.
4. However, as of writing still no mention of Monterey guest support in VMware Fusion's latest blog posts. (My personal assumption is they intend to remain competitive with Parallels and will announce something as soon as their PR lawyers sign off on their presumed parallel progress on this front…)
5. But Oracle® VM VirtualBox™ seems unlikely to support this. The verdict among moderators of its forum is that an ARM port would be completely unpossible; and another moderator of the VirtualBox forums closed this ticket with "VirtualBox is an x86 emulator. I don't think that an ARM port (or a PowerPC, or a Sparc, or a <InsertFavoriteArchitectureHere>) will ever happen." So my impression is that the team has never been interested in any other CPU architectures and will continue that tradition for Apple Silicon as well.