Skip to main content
Mac miniMac Studiovz fleet10 GbE · Thunderbolt 5

Build a Mac cloud
from the Macs you have.

A shelf of Mac minis and Mac Studios becomes one API: macOS guests for Xcode CI, Linux VMs, agent sandboxes and container VMs, placed on the Mac that fits.

Read the guideRun it for realFluxVM on one Mac
A FluxVM control plane placing vz virtual machines on two Mac Studios and two Mac minis linked by Thunderbolt 5 and 10 GbE: a macOS guest, an agent sandbox, a container VM and a Debian guest with Rosetta
Illustration. Fleet placement is verified on one real Mac plus simulated nodes; no second Mac has been used yet.

What people build

One fleet, every kind of machine

CI

Xcode CI on macOS guests

Clone a prepared macOS template per job with APFS, run xcodebuild over SSH, throw it away. Two macOS guests per Mac, so add Macs to add lanes.

AI

An agent farm

Disposable Linux sandboxes for coding agents through MCP: offline or allow-listed, forked into running copies in about 4 s, with a warm pool that restores in about 2 s.

OCI

Containers, each in a VM

OCI images as lightweight VMs with a read-only root and uid 65534. linux/amd64 images run under Rosetta.

Dev

Dev boxes for the team

Describe a database, an app and a test runner in fluxvm.toml; fluxctl up --fleet picks the Mac that fits.

What your team gets

A cloud, not a shelf

Tenants and leases, snapshots, volumes, tunnels, graphs and a console, in one API. Each card says what it has actually been run against.

Mac leases and tenants

A tenant rents a whole, empty Mac for at least 24 hours (Apple’s licence rule), with quotas, scrub-on-release and drain.

Tested against simulated Macs

Snapshots and clones

Save a VM with or without memory, roll back while it runs, and clone it into a new VM under the same quota.

Tested against simulated Macs

Persistent volumes

Disks that outlive a VM. A VM that uses one is placed on its Mac, and two VMs never share one.

Tested against simulated Macs

SSH without exposing the Mac

fluxctl fleet ssh and port-forward go through central, so tenants never need a route to a Mac.

Tested against simulated Macs

Warm pools

Booted VMs waiting, so a CI job starts in seconds; the pool boots a replacement after each claim.

Tested against simulated Macs

Graphs and Prometheus

CPU, memory and disk per VM and per Mac, fluxctl fleet top, and a /metrics endpoint with a scrape-only token.

Tested against simulated Macs

SSO and roles

Console sign-in through your OIDC provider, with viewer, member, admin and owner roles.

Implemented; no real identity provider run

Prices, statements, budgets

A price list, monthly statements per tenant (CSV too), budgets that warn at 80%, and signed webhooks.

Tested against simulated Macs

Go, Python, TypeScript, Terraform

Typed clients for the fleet API, an OpenAPI description and a Terraform provider.

Tested against fakes

Four steps

From a shelf of Macs to a team’s cloud

1

Run FluxVM on every Mac

The daemon as a service in a logged-in session, so warm starts and snapshot restore survive a reboot.

2

Start one central

The fleet registry and API. Built from source today (cargo build -p fluxvm-agent); it is not in the Homebrew package yet.

3

Register each Mac

Each node reports free CPU and memory, its macOS guest count and what Virtualization.framework can do there.

4

Give a team a tenant

A tenant gets its own token, quotas and Mac leases, and uses the fleet like one big machine.

Terminal — zsh
# 1. Run FluxVM on every Mac
brew install zyvorai/tap/fluxvm
brew services start zyvorai/tap/fluxvm


# 2. Start one central
TOKEN=$(openssl rand -hex 16)
fluxvm-agent central --listen 127.0.0.1:7799 --token $TOKEN \
  --public-url https://cloud.example.com


# 3. Register each Mac
fluxvm-agent node --name studio-1 \
  --central http://fleet-registry:7799 --token $TOKEN \
  --advertise-url http://studio-1.local:7788


# 4. Give a team a tenant
fluxctl fleet --token $TOKEN tenant create acme --max-vms 8
fluxctl fleet lease create          # rent a whole Mac, 24 h minimum
fluxctl fleet launch --image debian-13 web-1
fluxctl fleet ssh web-1             # through central; no route to the Mac

Before you rack it

A headless Mac, done right

Stay logged in

Virtualization.framework restores saved state only in an unlocked session. Use a dedicated user with automatic login and the screen lock off.

One APFS volume

Keep templates and VM state on the same volume so clones are instant. A clone across volumes is a full copy of a 20+ GB disk.

Size for unified memory

FluxVM does not cap guest memory on a Mac. Budget macOS, your models and every guest together; the scheduler keeps headroom.

What is and is not verified

  • Everything marked verified ran on one Apple M4 with macOS 27.2.
  • vz placement in fluxvm-agent central was checked with one real Mac and simulated nodes. No multi-Mac fleet has run on real hardware yet.
  • The platform features above were run against central plus simulated Macs and covered by tests; none has run across several real Macs, against real Stripe, or with a real identity provider.
  • Self-service sign-up and Stripe are off by default. Sign-up confirms the address by a mailed link and needs a mail webhook before it can be opened; shared warm pools are off for tenants unless the operator allows them: see the operations guide.
  • Thunderbolt RDMA, the shared vmnet broker and physical USB passthrough are not verified.

The full list →