macOS 27: need VM-to-VM networking with a Windows guest after Shared Network broke in QEMU backend

[Ravi-O3]

Hardware: MacBook Air M4, 16GB RAM, VMs stored on an external SSD (APFS)
Host OS: macOS 27.0.0 (Apple Silicon)
UTM version: 4.7.5 & 5.0.6 Beta, DMG build (not App Store)

What I need

Three VMs on one subnet that can see each other:

• Ubuntu running Wazuh manager
• Kali as attacker
• Windows 11 ARM as target, running a Wazuh agent

It is a home SOC lab, so VM-to-VM traffic with real source IPs is the whole point. Isolation from my home LAN is preferred but not mandatory.

This worked perfectly on UTM before I updated macOS. Shared Network on the QEMU backend, all VMs on 192.168.64.0/24, pinging each other, agents reporting to Wazuh.

What broke

After updating to macOS 27, changing the network mode on a QEMU VM hangs on a spinner for every mode except Emulated VLAN. Emulated VLAN gives each VM its own userspace NAT, so the VMs cannot reach each other and my lab topology is dead.

What I have already tried

1. Apple Virtualization backend instead of QEMU. Shared Network works there, but Apple's framework cannot run Windows guests at all. I have also read that VM-to-VM traffic does not work on Shared even between two Linux guests, only on Bridged (see Clarify "Shared network" #6568). Even the Linux does not run as smoothly as before and crashes/does not boot at all sometimes.
2. Bridged on en0. This puts VMs on my home Wi-Fi LAN, which I would accept, but I would like to know whether it is reliable for others on macOS 27.
3. VMware Fusion (free tier). Installed it, VMs will not power on at all, the play button is greyed out. System extensions were approved.
4. Emulated VLAN with port forwarding through the Mac host. Works technically, but the Windows guest then logs the attacker as 10.0.2.2 instead of Kali's real IP, which destroys source-IP correlation and makes the lab useless for what I am practising.

Constraints

Free software only, no paid hypervisors, no cloud spend. I am happy to rebuild every VM from scratch, I have no attachment to the existing disks. I just need it to run as smoothly as UTM did before.

Questions

1. Is anyone running Windows ARM plus Linux guests on one mutually reachable subnet on macOS 27? Which hypervisor and which network mode?
2. Is the QEMU network-mode spinner hang a known regression on macOS 27, and is there a workaround? Is editing the .utm config plist directly a viable route to set Shared Network?
3. If Bridged turns out to be the only working path, are there gotchas on a Wi-Fi-only Mac with no Ethernet port?

Happy to provide logs or test anything.

[johnkgibson]

The same thing is happening to me. I had to reset my m1 MacBook Pro. I have been trying to install Windows 10 because I need it for to run software that isn't available for MacOS.