I use a MacBook Pro M1 for my development and am a happy user. I am developing training materials and want to provide pre-cooked virtual machines for students to experiment with various exercises in a sandboxed environment.
On an Intel-based Mac, I used VirtualBox because of its easy availability of images, but there are no recent VirtualBox environments for M1. Besides, today's VirtualBox for M1 is in beta and still pretty unreliable in my brief experience. So, I need an alternative. I tried QEMU, but I am also not happy with the results.
I am also a long-time user of Parallels Desktop. It just works. And I love software that works. I thought it would be logical to switch to Parallels Desktop to deal with this lack of a properly working VirtualBox environment. To my surprise, it was hard to impossible to find some Vagrant boxes for M1. I got surprised that there are very few M1 boxes and even fewer for Parallels Desktop.
It's still puzzling to me why there are so few Vagrant boxes after so many years of M1 and M2 processors for Apple devices. I know quite a few developers that mainly work on a Mac, so you'd think there is sufficient need for such boxes.
Anyway, I created an AlmaLinux 9.1 Vagrant base box for a Parallels provider to run on a Mac M1 because I want such a box myself. I had never made a Vagrant box before, so it took some time and learning, but today I published version 0.2 of this box. You can find it here: https://app.vagrantup.com/wijnandsruud/boxes/AlmaLinux-9.1-aarch64/versions/0.2.
This box is based on AlmaLinux 9.1-update-1-aarch64-minimal. The base image claims about 2 GB of disk space and linked clones about 86 MB. I may try to shrink the disk space required in the future, but I have no plans for that now.
I will share a tutorial post soon on how I created this Vagrant box.
I hope you enjoy it.
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