VMware Communities
lse123
Hot Shot
Hot Shot
Jump to solution

Run the same VM [guest Windows 10 Pro 64-bit] in Mac Catalina and Windows 10

Can Run the same VM [guest Windows 10 Pro 64-bit] in both Mac Catalina and Windows 10 Pro,...? I mean having VM in an external SSD Drive like the below... and may half-week in Mac host and rest in Windows host interchangeably? or must only in one host Platform... for avoiding problems? If yes, what must format the external SSD drive?

I have VMware Fusion 11.5.5 and VMware Workstation 15.x

SAMSUNG PORTABLE SSD T7 MU-PC500R / SOLID STATE DRIVE / ENCRYPTED / 500 GB / EXTERNAL (PORTABLE) / USB 3.2 GEN 2 (USB-C CONNECTOR) / 256-BIT AES / RED METALLIC | MU-PC500R/WW

Reply
0 Kudos
1 Solution

Accepted Solutions
wila
Immortal
Immortal
Jump to solution

Hi,

In theory exFAT would work.

In practice it is a horrible disk format to store your VM on, I tried it before and ended up with broken VMs.

There's also customers of Vimalin trying to use exFAT and having problems making reliable backups. Those problems went away after they used HFS instead (on the same hardware)

I would have suggested normal FAT32, but there's two problems.

1. Your virtual disk is a single file instead of a disk made up of disk slices

2. Your disk is 300GB, as such the disk slices will be bigger than 4GB if you switch over to a split disk. The max size a split disk can have with 4GB disk slices is 128GB. Once you go over 128GB on a single virtual disk the slices can grow larger than 4GB. The way I deal with that is to have more than one virtual disk. Each virtual disk then has disk slices smaller than 4GB.

Which kind of condemns you to use exFAT unless you resort to 3rd party drivers for read/write non native file formats.

But I strongly suggest you to make regular  backups.

Actually would suggest that anyways if you run VMs on an external disk as that -be default- is a more fragile configuration as running a VM from a local disk.

Reason being that it is much easier to disconnect the disk with a VM running.

As for the initial question.

Yes it works to share VMs between Windows and macOS. It is recommended to commit snapshots and shut down -not suspend- the VM before switching the host platforms.

Note that there might be complaints at boot time of your VM about things not available on the host platform (eg. shared folders, physical cdrom, virtual network config etc..)

--

Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva

View solution in original post

Reply
0 Kudos
4 Replies
scott28tt
VMware Employee
VMware Employee
Jump to solution

That's technically possible.

VM hardware version 16 is compatible with Fusion 11.x and Workstation 15.x - see here: VMware Knowledge Base

There's a process and some additional notes here: VMware Knowledge Base

As for the format of your SSD drive, any filesystem that both your host OSes support.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Although I am a VMware employee I contribute to VMware Communities voluntarily (ie. not in any official capacity)
VMware Training & Certification blog
Reply
0 Kudos
lse123
Hot Shot
Hot Shot
Jump to solution

in case my vmdk is over 300GB IN ONE FILE

Then the preferred File System format to work in Mac & Windows is exFAT...?  Exist others in this case???

Reply
0 Kudos
scott28tt
VMware Employee
VMware Employee
Jump to solution

That's a Mac/Windows question, one which Google would answer better than I could.


-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Although I am a VMware employee I contribute to VMware Communities voluntarily (ie. not in any official capacity)
VMware Training & Certification blog
Reply
0 Kudos
wila
Immortal
Immortal
Jump to solution

Hi,

In theory exFAT would work.

In practice it is a horrible disk format to store your VM on, I tried it before and ended up with broken VMs.

There's also customers of Vimalin trying to use exFAT and having problems making reliable backups. Those problems went away after they used HFS instead (on the same hardware)

I would have suggested normal FAT32, but there's two problems.

1. Your virtual disk is a single file instead of a disk made up of disk slices

2. Your disk is 300GB, as such the disk slices will be bigger than 4GB if you switch over to a split disk. The max size a split disk can have with 4GB disk slices is 128GB. Once you go over 128GB on a single virtual disk the slices can grow larger than 4GB. The way I deal with that is to have more than one virtual disk. Each virtual disk then has disk slices smaller than 4GB.

Which kind of condemns you to use exFAT unless you resort to 3rd party drivers for read/write non native file formats.

But I strongly suggest you to make regular  backups.

Actually would suggest that anyways if you run VMs on an external disk as that -be default- is a more fragile configuration as running a VM from a local disk.

Reason being that it is much easier to disconnect the disk with a VM running.

As for the initial question.

Yes it works to share VMs between Windows and macOS. It is recommended to commit snapshots and shut down -not suspend- the VM before switching the host platforms.

Note that there might be complaints at boot time of your VM about things not available on the host platform (eg. shared folders, physical cdrom, virtual network config etc..)

--

Wil

| Author of Vimalin. The virtual machine Backup app for VMware Fusion, VMware Workstation and Player |
| More info at vimalin.com | Twitter @wilva
Reply
0 Kudos