From the UTM website, I could see that 30+ processors supported by QEMU, including x86_64, ARM64, and RISC-V are all supported by UTM virtualization on MacOS.However, I could see the ARM64 provides the best performance. Any OS platform of ARM64 or even intel/AMDx86 works on UTM.Windows 11 ARM (preview editions are available to download from Microsoft ).Ubuntu ARM (I tested Ubuntu 20.04 and Ubuntu 22.04).

You can create a variety of Virtual Machines on UTM.

I have tried out several changes in RAM, CPU, Disk, Networking, interfaces and so on without facing any challenges.

Almost all possible Computing customizations are available in UTM VMs.

Mouse moving in and out of VMs has no problems, and changing screen resolutions is also easy.

Configuring networking and other computing settings is easy as well.

No additional software/middleware installations are required, such as VBox guest additions, which are necessary in the case of VirtualBox.

Pausing and starting running from the pause state of VMs take 2-5 seconds!.

I did not notice any glitches in Macbook M1/M2.

It works very fast, just like VirtualBox VMs.

The UI is intuitive and customizable, and for the guest VMs, menu panels and editors, all are minimal and practical.

UTM UI is very close to Oracle VirtualBox’s User interface.

Here is a list of points I could notice after a few months of trying out UTM on a Macbook. I am a heavy user of Virtual Machines, and now on an M2-based Mac, UTM was found to be the perfect solution for my continuous VM usage. The main reason is that UTM software and its dependencies are all free and open-source. I did a lot of research, tried VMWare Fusion for mac and Parallels, and finally chose UTM.

Why choose UTM for m1/m2 mac virtualization? When I moved on as a full-time user of the M2 MacBook Pro, my first challenge was the unavailability of the Oracle VirtualBox ARM version. However, all software is not ready to switch to the ARM platform yet (as of 2022), which is sometimes leading us to deep research on how to make it work! Switching from an Intel x86 processor to Apple SoC is fascinating because m1/m2 computing can bring in significant speed ( that is my experience). In this guide, we will walk through the setup of a complete Virtualization platform for Apple M1/M2-based MacBooks called UTM.

Virtualbox for mac m1