Running BGP or IPv6 security lab on Apple M1

The newest hardware made by Apple (M1/M2) dropped CPUs by Intel and developed their own ARM-based Systems-on-Chip. Because of that, VirtualBox does not work there well (at the time of writing there is a developer preview of VirtualBox for M1, but it is still far from usable). There are however some working virtualisation solutions (to run native aarch64 operating systems) as well as emulation solutions (to emulate amd64 architecture). One of them that is freely available is UTM. It uses QEMU behind the scenes and provide nice frontend which is very well integrated with macOS.

The lab can be installed automatically from scratch, but we provide pre-build images for M1 computers, read further.

Easy installation and usage of BGP security lab on Apple M1

1. Download and install UTM
2. Download lab VM image for BGP Security Labs (2 GB) or lab VM image for IPv6 Security Labs (2 GB)
3. Unzip the downloaded file.
4. Start the UTM app.
5. Double click on unzipped UTM package. The VM gets imported into UTM app.
6. Press the ▶️ button to start the VM.
7. Wait about a minute to give the VM time to start up. Nothing will be visible on the screen.
8. Open a web browser and point it to http://localhost:8080/. You should see the lab environment.
9. When you want to stop the lab, open "Admin console" in the lab environment and type in sudo poweroff. The virtual machine will stop in a minute.
10. In case you want to start fresh, the only option is to delete the unzipped UTM package and unzip it again.