How to Install VirtualBox on an Apple Silicon Mac?

Let me guide you how to install VirtualBox on Apple Mac and then how to create your first virtual machine on virtual and VirtualBox in M1 and M2 mac easily. When Apple introduced the Apple Silicon Mac into the market, users had to install intel VirtualBox. And then thanks to the Rosetta 2 Emulator provided by Apple, users were using these virtualization using the VirtualBox. However recently VirtualBox has provided a native Apple Silicon VirtualBox that you can try to test any operating system. Anyway, Let’s find out the steps of How to Install VirtualBox on an Apple Silicon Mac and then how to create your first Virtualization. 

Steps to Install VirtualBox on an Apple Silicon Mac

Recently the VirtualBox team has created the native version of VirtualBox that can natively run on Apple silicon mac. Currently it is in the beta version but you can still use it for testing purposes. But keep in mind that it may have bugs since it is in the early stages but we hope that overtime they will fix the issues.

1. Visit the official downward page of VirtualBox.
2. Click on Developer preview for macOS / Arm64 (M1/M2) hosts, and simply save it on your system.
3. Following that, Launch the MDG file downloaded and follow through the on-screen instructions.
4. After the installation, click on VirtualBox.pkg, this is going to launch the installer. Simply install it and than check if the VirtualBox has been added to the Applications directory or no, if it is added, the installation is successful. If it was not their, try again.

Note: During the Installation of VirtualBox.pkg, the installer may ask for your password, where you must enter. Because without that, you won’t be able to install the VirtualBox on your Apple Silicon Mac.

How to Create Your First Virtual Machine on VirtualBox in M1 and M2 Mac?

Creating a virtual machine in VirtualBox on your Apple Silicon Mac is the same as you used to do on the Intel Mac. The steps are all the same however still if you do not know follow the below instructions.

1. Download the operating system that you want to run its virtual machine on your Apple Silicon Mac.
2. Following that launch the VirtualBox that you installed earlier from the applications directory.
3. To create a new virtual machine, click on new the moment the VirtualBox is launched.
4. In this step you have to give a name to the virtual machine, Mention the place where you want to save the virtual machine, And finally Locate the ISO of the OS that you want to run it the VM environment. Also keep in mind if the operating system is a popular, VirtualBox is going to detect automatically its version If it did not detect then you have to manually choose the operating system version yourself.
5. Unattended Guest OS install help is the place where you can bring custom changes, however I do not want to do anything I will just simply keep this section. and also keep in mind that you can add your own custom username and password for the full machine.
6. This is the place where you have to configure the RAM and the CPU cores. Mostly it depends on the type of word that you want to do on the virtual machine However it is a good idea to give half the resources of your computer to the virtual machine.
7. In this place you have to choose the first option and then mention the amount of storage that you want to give to the virtual machine. For instance, 25GB will be a good choice for running Ubuntu on your virtual machine system.
8. This is the final step where VirtualBox is providing you a summarize of the settings that you have implemented until now on the virtual machine. If you want to bring changes on them you have to go back to those steps and reconfigure them, if everything is OK click Finish.
9. Congratulations for creating a successful virtual machine. Now go ahead and install installing the OS in the VirtualBox on the Apple Silicon Mac. To start installing, click on a start and follow the on screen instructions.

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Conclusion:

These were the steps that you can use to simply install and create a virtual machine on your Apple Silicon Mac using VirtualBox easily. You can try any operating system that you wish but the first step is to download the ISO of that operating system, without it you can’t do anything at all.