Virtual Router Lab on macOS with QEMU
Introduction UTM and Multipass are great apps for virtualization on macOS. But I wanted a lighter-weight approach by invoking QEMU directly. Which meant I needed to understand how QEMU’s networking options interact with the vmnet virtualization API on macOS. This becomes especially important when dealing with VM-to-VM connections, network isolation, and bridging on macOS. In this post, I’ll walk through creating a simple QEMU-based networking lab. Set up RouterOS and Alpine Linux VMs using QEMU on macOS Connect VMs with Apple’s Hypervisor vmnet networking APIs Use unified logging to troubleshoot QEMU network issues on macOS Lab Setup Overview The network diagram shows the network topology used in this lab. Both VMs run on on the same macOS host and connected to virtual network interfaces using QEMU’s support for Apple’s vmnet virtualization API. ...