Move from VirtualBox to another driver

As of Multipass 1.17, the VirtualBox driver is being deprecated and will be removed in an upcoming release. Unlike other driver deprecations, no migration of VirtualBox instances is planned. Multipass will warn VirtualBox users of the deprecation and ask them to move away as soon as possible.

We recommend switching to the platform-appropriate replacement driver:

Switch to applevz:

multipass set local.driver=applevz

Switch to hcs:

multipass set local.driver=hcs

Your VirtualBox instances are not destroyed when you switch, but they become unreachable from the new driver — Multipass keeps separate instance scopes per driver (see Driver). You can switch back to virtualbox for now if you still need those instances, but once the driver is removed, you will need to manually recreate any instances you want to keep under the new driver.

Recreating instances under the new driver

Since there is no migration path, moving an instance means launching a fresh one under the new driver and bringing over anything you need from the old one, for example:

multipass set local.driver=virtualbox
multipass mount <local-path> <instance>:<path>
# or: multipass transfer <instance>:<path> <local-path>, to copy files out
multipass set local.driver=<new-driver>
multipass launch --name <instance> ...
multipass mount <local-path> <instance>:<path>
# or: multipass transfer <local-path> <instance>:<path>, to copy files in

Once you have (re-)created the instances you need on the new driver, you can permanently delete the original instances. For this, temporarily move back to virtualbox and use the delete (and purge) command before switching to the applevz driver again:

multipass set local.driver=virtualbox
multipass delete [-p] <instance> [...]
multipass set local.driver=applevz

Once you have (re-)created the instances you need on the new driver, you can permanently delete the original instances. For this, you can temporarily move back to virtualbox and use the delete (and purge) command before switching to the hcs driver again:

multipass set local.driver=virtualbox
multipass delete [-p] <instance> [...]
multipass set local.driver=hcs

You can move back and forth between virtualbox and the new driver as many times as you want until VirtualBox is removed. Apart from the deprecation warning, old functionality remains the same until then.