If the topic of virtualization interests you, check out some more of our posts on the subject. The host operating system refers to the operating system on which VirtualBox is running. Plays the role of hypervisor, building a VM (virtual machine) where the user can use another operating system (operating system). There are many other options available for virtualization, including the free UTM app which allows you to easily run Windows 11 on an Apple Silicon Mac for example, but there’s also paid solutions including VMWare and Parallels. The x86 computing architecture can be virtualized using the free and open source program VirtualBox.

Go to to find the appropriate download, listed as “Developer preview for macOS / Arm64 (M1/M2) hosts”.

As usual, VirtualBox is completely free to download and to use. While technically in beta, anyone can get access to the developer preview beta ARM build of VirtualBox through the VirtualBox website. It does this by virtualizing hardware (that you can adjust to allocate RAM, storage capacity, etc), so the operating system itself doesn’t know that it’s not running on actual hardware. VirtualBox is virtualization software that allows you to run other operating systems in containers on your Mac directly from the application, for example you can run Linux or Windows directly within VirtualBox, and without having to use dual-booting or anything else.

Windows 11 virtual box