![]() ![]() However, for smaller teams without venture capital, it’s an important metric. This is in some ways understandable, as most articles are from large companies, and engineers aren’t included in their price decisions. I haven’t found a single writeup that takes price into consideration when discussing macOS virtualization. The Android Emulator uses virtualization, and while it seems some services like Anka support this, there’s considerable performance overhead. Not all solutions support nested virtualization, which is needed if you run other CI tests as well. (Veertu is reported to be working on it.) Nested Virtualization For example, the iOS Simulator uses Metal for acceleration in Big Sur, but none of the virtualization solutions support a virtualized Metal graphic card. Relying on virtualization will also delay adoption of new OS versions or hardware such as Big Sur or Apple Silicon, as the vendor first has to finish updating its product. There are reports of memory leaks, “ VMs just getting stuck,” and “ unreliable USB passthrough.” In cases where a company relies on a system Hypervisor (Anka uses Apple’s Hypervisor framework), there are only limited ways to work around bugs. With an additional software layer, you’ll inherit bugs. Lyft moved to bare metal for similar reasons. Spotify moved from VMware to bare metal in late 2019 for performance reasons like total speed and a more predictable environment. With different VMs running on a machine, performance varies based on workloads in other VMs. Your VM setup also might be otherwise constrained, resulting in poor networking performance. It’s hard to measure exactly how much that is, but reports go from twice as slow to a mere 10 percent overhead. PerformanceĮvery solution that puts layers between the OS and the hardware will incur a performance overhead. Below I’ll outline some of the considerations. I asked peers on Twitter for their experiences using these technologies. While image-based solutions are intriguing, there’s a performance and complexity overhead when using virtualization, especially with macOS, which wasn’t made to be virtualized. VMware vSphere is the oldest available solution, whereas Anka (2017) and Orka (2019) are newer technologies. It is possible to install macOS with open source solutions such as KVM, but this requires a lot of dedication and - if you factor in time - it’s likely more expensive than commercial solutions. When it comes to macOS virtualization, there are three commercial solutions available on the market: This article is part of a series about Continuous Integration for Small iOS/macOS Teams. It also officially stipulates that renting software is allowed, just in time for Amazon to enter the space with its new EC2 Mac instances. With the release of Big Sur, Apple changed the license to double down on the macOS hardware requirement. This restriction, combined with the fact that Apple doesn’t offer server hardware, increases costs and makes running macOS more expensive and challenging. This is not a technical limitation - macOS runs perfectly fine in virtualization on standard PC hardware - but rather a restriction in Apple’s EULA. Running macOS - even virtualized - requires macOS hardware. There’s a reason why build minutes are more expensive on continuous integration (CI) services when it comes to macOS: Macs are notoriously difficult to use via CI. ![]()
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