Choosing Your Initial Cloud

Currently, MacStadium can accommodate virtualization on the following three platforms.
And while all MacStadium private clouds provide virtualization on Mac hardware,
development teams have distinct virtualization needs, so one solution may be a better fit than another.

Orka

Orka is MacStadium's proprietary, Kubernetes-based solution.

Pros:

Orka is simple to get started, and it is inherently powerful. A proprietary solution, MacStadium's Orka offers a unique, K8s-based experience in a Mac environment. This means that teams no longer require the degree of expertise in virtualization that macOS dev ops processes used to.

Considerations:

Orka is currently in GA v1.x.x, so we have to warn you that changes will be coming.

VMware

VMware is a cross-platform leader in enterprise tier virtualization.

Pros:

VMware was the first hypervisor to support Macs. It has unmatched enterprise IT and security credibility, and the latest release has built-in support for Mojave as well as Instant Clones, which are faster and lighter-weight than a VM has ever been.

Considerations:

That said, Apple support and CI/CD are not VMware’s primary use case, which means that the experience can be clunky unless your team is already familiar with VMware products.