How Apple Limits VMs
Learn how you can use the Virtualization framework to quickly create virtual machines on your Mac. We’ll show you how to create a virtual Mac and quickly test changes to your app in an isolated environment. We’ll also explore how you can install and run full Linux distributions on Apple silicon, and share how you can take advantage of Rosetta 2 to run x86-64 Linux binaries.
As your licence from Apple explicitly limits you to running no more that two copies of macOS as guests, it’s up to you to observe that licence condition, and up to Apple to enforce it on you. So, in the past, you may well have run more than two copies of macOS in VMs, although that’s in breach of Apple’s licence. What’s different with lightweight virtualisation using the Virtualization framework in macOS is that it’s Apple’s code which creates and runs each VM, thus Apple can enforce its restrictive licence terms by limiting the number of macOS VMs that can be run at any one time, and that’s what it does, and why I think Apple needs to change that.
Previously:
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They are probably afraid you’ll buy fewer Macs.
But what if I own two Macs, and want to run all four of my allowed virtualisation on a single Mac?
Shouldn't that be allowed according to the license, and yet is disallowed according to the software…
What is Apple afraid of me doing if I were to run more than two macOS guest VMs? That I might actually be more productive?