VMCLI

A set of utilities to help you manage VMs with Virtualization.framework

Installation

Prerequisites

macOS Big Sur (11+)
XCode.app installed

# make sure xcode command-line tools are installed
xcode-select --install

# run build, install. This will install vmcli and vmctl to /usr/local/bin
make
sudo make install

You have now finished installing vmcli and vmctl

Set environment variable VMCTLDIR to ~/VMs so vmctl knows how to find VMs. If you don't set this, vmctl will use current working directory to find VMs.

echo 'export VMCTLDIR="$HOME/VMs"' >> ~/.zprofile
export VMCTLDIR="$HOME/VMs"

Provision a Ubuntu VM, and install that to ~/VMs. The VM will auto create your user with your ssh public key at ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub.

make build/vm/ubuntu
mv build/vm/ubuntu "${VMCTLDIR}/ubuntu"

Optionally expand the VM volume, for example to 16G.

dd if=/dev/null of="${VMCTLDIR}/ubuntu/disk.img" bs=1g count=0 seek=16

Optionally edit the VM config for more RAM and/or CPU cores

vi "${VMCTLDIR}/ubuntu/vm.conf"

Start the VM

vmctl start ubuntu

Attach to the serial console, use (CTRL+A - D to quit)

vmctl attach ubuntu

You can use vmctl ip ubuntu to check your VM IP.

Wait for the VM to boot and ssh into the VM

vmctl ssh ubuntu

You should shutdown the VM using ssh within the VM. If that's not an option, you can forcibly shut it down.

vmctl stop ubuntu

Share folders with host

Support for sharing folders with the host was added in macOS 12 (Monterey), and this is enabled if compiled on 12.0 or later.

As of 12.1 the macOS support for this feature seems somewhat unreliable. If you want to try it anyway, use --folder <host path>:<tag> arguments. In the guest, mount these using -t virtiofs <tag> <guest mountpoint>.

If the :<tag> component is omitted, the host path will be used as a tag, but note there is a size limit of 36 UTF-8 bytes for tags.

The shared folder can be made read-only to the guest by adding ro as a third component to the shared folder argument: --folder <host path>:<tag>:ro

For example: in the host, create a foo directory in the VM directory (where the kernel and initrd live), and add this using --folder. For example, add folder=foo to vm.conf, or pass --folder=foo to vmcli directly.

In the guest, ensure /mnt/foo is an empty directory, then sudo mount -t virtiofs foo /mnt/foo.

Known Issues

Virtual Machine cannot be started with networking when InternetSharing is already enabled. See #5.

Usage

vmcli

USAGE: vmcli [--cpu-count <cpu-count>] [--memory-size <memory-size>] [--memory-size-suffix <memory-size-suffix>] [--disk <disk> ...] [--cdrom <cdrom> ...] [--folder <folder> ...] [--network <network> ...] [--balloon <balloon>] [--bootloader <bootloader>] [--kernel <kernel>] [--initrd <initrd>] [--cmdline <cmdline>] [--escape-sequence <escape-sequence>]

OPTIONS:
  -c, --cpu-count <cpu-count>
                          CPU count (default: 1)
  -m, --memory-size <memory-size>
                          Memory Bytes (default: 512)
  --memory-size-suffix <memory-size-suffix>
                          Memory Size Suffix (default: MiB)
  -d, --disk <disk>       Disks to use
  --cdrom <cdrom>         CD-ROMs to use
  -f, --folder <folder>   Folders to share (macOS 12.0 or later)
  -n, --network <network> Networks to use. e.g. aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff@nat for a nat device, or ...@en0 for bridging to en0. Omit mac address for a
                          generated address. (default: nat)
  --balloon <balloon>     Enable / Disable Memory Ballooning (default: true)
  -b, --bootloader <bootloader>
                          Bootloader to use (default: linux)
  -k, --kernel <kernel>   Kernel to use
  --initrd <initrd>       Initrd to use
  --cmdline <cmdline>     Kernel cmdline to use
  --escape-sequence <escape-sequence>
                          Escape Sequence, when using a tty (default: q)
  -h, --help              Show help information.

vmctl

usage: vmctl {start|stop|attach|ip|ssh} vm
       vmctl list

References

SimpleVM is a proof-of-concept using Virtualization.framework by KhaosT

vftool is a very similar tool written by evansm7 but in Objective-C not Swift.

gyf304 / vmcli