dnsmasq Server for DHCP on VMs

[areeckmann]

Hi,

I've been using UTM (4.5.3 w QEMU) to virtualise four ubuntu server vms (24.04) on my MacBook.
Setting up dnsmasq to handle DNS was fairly straight forward. When using manual ipv4 addresses, VMs can talk to eachother and dig returns the expected results.

When trying to set up dnsmasq to handle dhcp as well i ran into a problem:
I cant stop my host machine from also offering dhcp. When I configure my vms to use dhcp instead of a manual ip i get the expected behaviour of multiple dhcp servers serving the same address range.

Is there a way to stop my host machine from giving out dhcp addresses but maintaining connectivity between VMs?

Please point me in the right direction if this has been answered already or is documented somewhere.
If there is information missing which you need to answer my question, I will gladly provide it.