How to load .ova on Mac M1 chip?

I have a Mac M1 apple chip, so I cannot install virtual box. I have a .ova file I need to load and was wondering how I should go about loading this. My coworkers use virtual box and ubuntu within the virtual box, can I simply use multipass to load this somehow? I'm very unfamiliar with virtual machines and ubuntu so any help would be great, thanks.

Could I possibly get an ubuntu VM and run the .ova within the ubuntu VM?

Solution 1:

Your main problem is not that it is a .ova file but that the virtual machine file is an Intel based machine so can't run on a M1 machine.

.ova files can be read by VMWare and VirtualBox but the former can't run Intel VMs and the latter is not available on non Intel machines.

You might be able to use UTM to emulate an Intel VM and that can load a .qcow2 file that can be converted from a .ova (see discussion in UTM GetHub) but then you would have to work out how to export your VM so your coworkers can use it.

However you really need to work out what exactly are you sharing - I would be surprised if it is the actual VM but just a block of data.

You can create a Ubuntu M1 virtual machine (in UTM, VMWare Fusion, Parallels Desktop or Docker) and most code can be built using ARM rather than Intel and then copy data around.

In general if this is for paid work use the machine the company provides not your own - so they can specify a setup that can share what is needed.