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Mount Thor runs two kinds of machine on Apple Silicon Macs. The biggest difference is what you may change on the machine.

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Use a virtual machine when you need administrator rights

You sign in to a VM as an administrator and can run commands with sudo. Use a VM when a workload changes the system itself: system settings, launch daemons, or kernel and network configuration. A VM is also the right choice for parallel jobs and fast create-delete cycles. See Virtual machines.

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Use bare metal for dedicated hardware

A bare-metal Mac is yours alone for the length of the lease. Use it when a workload needs a whole physical Mac, such as performance measurement that must not share hardware, or software that will not run inside a virtual machine. The account you sign in with on a bare-metal Mac is a permissive, non-root user: it runs your tools and workloads, but it is not an administrator and cannot change system settings. If you need administrator rights, use a virtual machine instead. The Bare metal page covers allocation, access and release.

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Machine classes

You create both types as a class of machine, such as m4-24g. The class specifies the Mac hardware allocated to you. List the classes available to your account with the API’s machine classes endpoint, GET /compute/v1/catalog/machineclasses, select one in the portal, or pick one interactively with mthr vm create and mthr bm allocate.