The entire hard drive will be overwritten, dual booting with another OS is not supported. This is the preferred means of running pfSense software. The USB memstick image is meant to be written to a USB flash drive before use and includes an installer that installs pfSense software to the hard drive on your system. If you purchased a Netgate product, refer to the product manual for your appliance to see which reinstall image you need. The Netgate ADI image only supports a serial installation from memstick and does not come with VGA option. The amd64 architecture (which works even on Intel 64-bit CPUs) can address more memory and may have other performance advantages, but requires a compatible CPU.

If you have a 64-bit capable CPU, use the amd64 version. If the topic of virtualization interests you, check out some more of our posts on the subject.You can determine the files needed for your install by reading the rest of this page for guidance. There are many other options available for virtualization, including the free UTM app which allows you to easily run Windows 11 on an Apple Silicon Mac for example, but there’s also paid solutions including VMWare and Parallels.

Go to to find the appropriate download, listed as “Developer preview for macOS / Arm64 (M1/M2) hosts”.

As usual, VirtualBox is completely free to download and to use. While technically in beta, anyone can get access to the developer preview beta ARM build of VirtualBox through the VirtualBox website. It does this by virtualizing hardware (that you can adjust to allocate RAM, storage capacity, etc), so the operating system itself doesn’t know that it’s not running on actual hardware. VirtualBox is virtualization software that allows you to run other operating systems in containers on your Mac directly from the application, for example you can run Linux or Windows directly within VirtualBox, and without having to use dual-booting or anything else.

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