FAQS

How do we differ from competition?

Mature and Battle-tested Ecosystem

It’s important to understand that virtualization on Intel and Silicon differ drastically behind the scenes.

• For Intel, Anka has always provided the most feature-rich and performant solution for enterprise grade macOS virtualization. We built a custom virtualization on top of Hypervisor framework to meet our customers needs for maximum performance and flexibility.
• For Silicon, Apple now requires all providers build on the Virtualization Framework and this limits the features and performance available for everyone.

For us at Veertu, it therefore becomes more about focusing on taking a holistic approach to the tools your team needs and ensuring they all function in an optimal way to maximize your CI and Automation task performance. This is where each of our custom built and flexible components of the Anka Build Cloud shine compared to other solutions.

Veertu’s Anka and Build Cloud is a suite of software tools built for small or enterprise level macOS virtualization needs. It enables the creation, storage, and management of macOS virtual machines (VMs), offering a user experience similar to what Docker and Docker Hub provide for container management, but with an added orchestrator component. Anka is specifically designed for DevOps, CI/CD, and Automation teams that need to build and test macOS or iOS applications.

Anka is a mature and battle-tested solution for small or large-scale macOS virtualization. Leveraging a combination of custom and Apple hypervisor/virtualization technology, Anka offers enhanced performance and security. It provides a simple CLI for generating Anka macOS VMs as well as tools like Packer. You can then manage the VMs as Templates/Tags in the Anka Registry (part of the Anka Build Cloud) and push/pull to and from hosts in your macOS cluster.

Alongside of the Anka Virtualization CLI is the Anka Build Cloud which serves as a unified management interface for Anka Build Nodes, VM Templates/Tags, VM instances, and logs. It features intelligent queueing and load balancing for handling numerous concurrent CI/CD job macOS VM requests. Additionally, it integrates with widely-used automation platforms and tools such as Jenkins, Github Actions, Buildkite, TeamCity, GitLab, and provides an API for custom integrations.

Anka is a robust and adaptable macOS virtualization platform that can enhance your DevOps and iOS CI/CD/Automation. It is straightforward to use and customize, and offers a broad array of features and capabilities.

World Class Support

Our users can also expect that when features are not available, we’ll work with you to define them to meet your needs. Our attentive and friendly support team is a major benefit to your ability to get up and running quickly, as well as help solve problems when they arise.

Ventura Host OS, Sonoma (14.x) VM creation requirements

On Silicon/ARM, creating macOS 14.x (or higher) VMs on Ventura Host OS requires Xcode 15 or greater. Alternatively, you can install the Device Support Image/dmg Apple provides.

Nested Virtualization?

Apple’s Virtualization.Framework on Apple Silicon/ARM doesn’t support nested virtualization such as Android emulators or Docker inside macOS VMs.

Keychain not accessible over SSH

Often users who want to use credentials in the VM’s keychain for things like codesigning will experience errors when using SSH. This is due to SSH not unlocking the keychain by default. You can add the following to your .zprofile, or run it manually to unlock the keychain:

security set-key-partition-list -v -S apple-tool:,apple: -s -k <Login Keychain Password> <Login Keychain Path> > 2>&1 > /dev/null

Unable to activate license

In order to activate your anka license with sudo anka license activate {LICENSE} the host must have access to two different urls in your firewall rules. Please reach out to us and we can provide them.