Experimenting with Proxmox on Apple Silicon: Turning Your M1 MacBook Air into a Virtual Datacentre

In an effort to create an easy-to-manage VM environment that I can use on the go, even with spotty internet, I decided to try running Proxmox on my Apple Silicon MacBook Air. Parallels and VMware Fusion were options, but I chose Proxmox to support open-source software. For production-level workloads, I would purchase a Proxmox license and use a dedicated server. Proxmox doesn't distribute arm64/aarch64 packages, so this experiment depended on an unofficial port.

Editor's Note: These instructions are now out of date, as there are newer versions of Proxmox, and they may support Arm too. This post is kept up for historical reference.

Getting started#

Proxmox is based on Debian but does not come packaged for arm64. A Debian installation can be converted to Proxmox, so I tried the same route used for x86_64.

UTM provides an interface for Apple's Hypervisor and QEMU. I could have used QEMU directly, but I chose UTM and created a Debian VM from one of the premade images in its gallery. Its presets supplied the VM configuration.

Converting Debian to Proxmox#

With Debian running, I needed Proxmox packages for Arm. Since Proxmox doesn't support Arm or distribute their packages for Arm I would have to build those myself. Luckily, some other kind soul already did this and published them.

Warning: I'm installing packages from an unofficial source. My risk level is fine with this, but if you are considering doing this, I strongly recommend you evaluate the choice carefully. If you are not comfortable, you can build the packages from source.

Before installing the packages, I made sure the VM's hostname resolved through /etc/hosts. The VM already used debian, so I added 192.168.64.11 debian to the end of the hosts file. This allowed both the VM and the Proxmox installer to resolve the hostname.

Update: These packages depended on OpenSSL 1.1, which is now removed from Debian, and so you'll need to build from source and link the packages to OpenSSL 3+

These are the commands I used for the original package installation:

# Add the 3rd party repository
echo "deb https://global.mirrors.apqa.cn/proxmox/debian/pve bullseye port">/etc/apt/sources.list.d/pveport.list

# Download/Trust the key that signs the 3rd party packages
curl https://global.mirrors.apqa.cn/proxmox/debian/pveport.gpg -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/pveport.gpg 

# pull the latest updates from the repositories, and update the system
apt update && apt full-upgrade

# install ifupdown2, which is required for Proxmox
apt install ifupdown2

# and finally, install Proxmox
apt install proxmox-ve postfix open-iscsi

After running these commands, I rebooted the VM and opened the Proxmox admin interface at https://YOUR_IP_HERE:8006.

Running Proxmox#

The resulting installation used the standard Proxmox interface. Any container or VM still needed an arm64/aarch64 image.

Alternatives considered#

Other options included Parallels, VMware Fusion, or Asahi Linux with VMs running directly on the host. A separate device would avoid running Proxmox inside another hypervisor, but I did not want to carry one when I was away from home. I preferred keeping the environment on my laptop without disrupting my day-to-day desktop.

Results#

On the M1 MacBook Air, I was able to run several VMs and containers without a noticeable performance hit. The experience was better than I expected from an x86_64 system with similar specifications, but I was not running a serious workload.

Terraform could've automated the environment setup, and the Proxmox API could script operations. I plan to keep experimenting with both.

Disclaimer#

Editor's Note: This setup is not recommended for production use. The arm64/aarch64 packages are unofficial and not provided by Proxmox. An M1 MacBook Air is not intended to be a server.