It’s slow - much slower than running a Hypervisor. There are other helpful articles out there discussing this particular solution, but after installing UTM the command you are probably looking for is this: qemu-img convert -f vdi -O qcow2 myvirtualbox.vdi myreplacementvm.qcow2 It is also likely your only real option for Windows VM’s due to the fact there is no commercially available version of Windows (yet) that can be legally purchased to run on ARM. This is likely your best if you need to launch your virtual machine quickly with minimum changes. qcow2 and run them under a true emulator such as UTM. The ‘quickest’ option to get the machines running again was to migrate my VirtualBox. Moving away from VirtualBoxĪfter researching the topic in-depth at the end of 2021, I felt had relatively few viable options. The new M1 is a different chip-set entirely (ARM), and as VirtualBox is not a CPU emulator there is no way it can run those existing images for you. This is important because older Intel versions of the Mac were able to run x86–64 versions of your favorite apps directly on the underlying hardware.

The main reason your virtual machines don’t run anymore is that VirtualBox runs as a hypervisor on your Mac, relying on the underlying processor to execute instructions rather than providing processor emulation through software. What nobody probably told you before you pressed the ‘Buy now’ button was that all your existing x86–64 machine you’d lovingly built using Vagrant and Virtualbox would no longer run! Why doesn’t it work? If you’ve landed on this article, you may have recently upgraded to a shiny new Macbook Pro or similar running the new M1 processor.

Qemu m1 mac