Fleet Manager

Fleet Manager

Early access: Fleet Manager is currently in beta. Small Batch license holders get early access to this feature.

Fleet Manager lets you scale macOS virtualization across multiple Macs — turning Mac minis, Mac Studios, and mixed Apple Silicon hardware into a unified compute pool.

This is the foundation for “build your own Mac cloud”: you own the hardware, Fleet Manager handles placement and orchestration.

What Fleet Manager does

  • Centralized dashboard — see every Mac, every VM, and their status at a glance
  • Live resource metrics — CPU, memory, disk usage across every node
  • Remote VM actions — start, stop, restart, or snapshot VMs on any node
  • Automatic discovery — new Macs appear automatically via Bonjour/mDNS; minimal config
  • SSH tunneling through NAT — connect to VMs on remote nodes even behind firewalls
  • Workload distribution — place VMs across available machines automatically
  • Respect Apple limits — enforce 2 running macOS VMs per node without manual balancing
  • Maintenance workflows — migrate or stop VMs on a node for upgrades, then bring it back into service

Why use Fleet Manager?

Apple limits concurrent VMs to 2 per physical Mac. Fleet Manager helps you work within that constraint by:

  • Treating multiple Macs as a single pool
  • Automatically placing new VMs on available hosts
  • Making it easy to migrate VMs between machines

VMs move — not rebuild.

Core concepts

  • Node: a physical Mac that is part of the fleet (Mac mini, Mac Studio, etc.).
  • Capacity: each node can run up to 2 macOS VMs at once (Apple’s platform limit).
  • Fleet: the set of nodes that can run VMs for your workloads (CI, QA, MDM testing, etc.).
  • Workload: one or more VMs created for a purpose (CI runners, test environments, MDM test VMs, etc.).

Rule of thumb: maximum concurrent macOS VMs = 2 × number of nodes.

Getting started

Fleet Manager is included with commercial licenses (Small Batch and above).

High-level steps:

  1. Prepare each Mac

    • Install CiderStack and activate your Small Batch (or higher) license.
    • Ensure each Mac is on a reliable network and can reach the others.

  2. Join nodes to the fleet

    • Open the Fleet Manager section in the CiderStack app.
    • On your “first” Mac, create or select a fleet.
    • On additional Macs, follow the pairing flow to join them to the same fleet.

  3. Verify the fleet

    • From the CLI, you can inspect the fleet state:

      cider fleet nodes --json
cider fleet vms --json

    • Confirm each node appears with its capacity and that VMs show the node they are running on.

Once nodes are in the fleet, creating or starting VMs will use the available capacity across machines instead of a single Mac.

CLI examples

Everything you can do in the UI, you can automate from the CLI.

# List all nodes in the fleet
cider fleet nodes
cider fleet nodes --json
 
# List VMs across the fleet
cider fleet vms --json
 
# Start a VM on a specific node
cider fleet exec mac-studio-02 vm start xcode-runner
 
# SSH into a VM on a remote node (tunneled through that node)
cider fleet ssh mac-mini-01:ci-worker-1

Use --json to integrate with your own monitoring, dashboards, or orchestration scripts.

Building your own Mac cloud

Some common patterns:

  • Small team build farm

    • 2–3 Mac minis or Studios in a rack or closet.
    • Fleet Manager spreads CI runners and test VMs across nodes.
    • Use snapshots and templates to standardize images (Xcode versions, tools).

  • Mixed-use fleet

    • Some VMs are long-lived (e.g. staging environments), others are ephemeral (CI runners with TTL).
    • Use --intent ci and --ttl when creating CI VMs so they auto-retire.

  • MDM and configuration testing

    • Dedicate a subset of nodes to MDM enrollment and profile testing.
    • Use snapshots (pre-enrollment) plus Fleet Manager to parallelize tests across machines.

Because CiderStack runs locally on your hardware:

  • No per-minute or per-hour billing.
  • No rented Macs or external control plane.
  • Full ownership of where workloads run and how long they live.

Maintenance without downtime

Fleet Manager is also about operations, not just scaling:

  • Drain a node by migrating or stopping its VMs.
  • Perform hardware or OS maintenance on that Mac.
  • Bring it back and let Fleet Manager start placing new workloads there again.

This lets you update or service individual Macs without halting the entire fleet.

Related

MDM testing with snapshotsOverview