vmware 10 on Mac Pro 2008 running Sierra

[jeglin]

I have an early 2008 Mac Pro running 10.12.6. Yes it's totally unsupported – I used dosdude1's macOS Sierra Patcher to install 10.12, and frankly it's been running superbly in all respects.

I also have Fusion 8.5.10 running virtual machines (Windows, Linux, OS X), with no issues. Fusion 10 requires >=Sierra, but technically that issue is no longer relevant; however, the Fusion 10 installer warns of unsupported CPU (host CPU does not support necessary requirements).

My question is: is this an absolute restriction or not? Obviously I can run both Sierra and High Sierra, despite warnings to the contrary. I'm interested in whether I can even hope for Vmware 10 to run (and if performance is not what I expect or need, to go back to 8), or whether this simply will refuse to run at all – has anyone tried it?

jeglin

[wila · Accepted solution]

Hi,

With some tweaks you can get some VMs to run, but they will run slow as syrup if you can get it to run.

You wouldn't even want to go there once you tried.

FWIW, it looks like that the setting is:

Add monitor.allowLegacyCPU = "true" to the config ini

Best to stay with Fusion 8.x

At least that works properly.

--

Wil

[jeglin]

Thanks that's helpful. I may try it then just to see what happens, when I have spare time. Will report back to this thread when I have any results to share.

[wila]

Hi,

Not sure if posting that tweak is helpful and I had my doubts on bringing it up as the only thing you can do with that is wasting your time.

So far I've heard of exactly zero cases where people thought it was a useful tweak.

See also my article here:

VMX unrestricted guest errors with Workstation 14 or Fusion 10 - PlanetVM

and a relevant quote from that article:

from a post from Ulli here: ESXi 6 VM unusable slow in WS 13 beta

To quote Ulli freely, “booting a ESXi 6 vSphere VM in Workstation 12.01 went from 30 seconds  to 12 hours in Workstation 14 beta”.

Fusion won't be any better than Workstation on this part I'm afraid.

--

Wil