Vmware fusion for Apple Silicon Mac with MacOs guest

[Soletetera]

It is proposed in future versions to be able to work with old versions of MacOS guests in M1 Macs?.
UTM can do it, why not VMWare? I'm waiting for to buy it.

[RDPetruska]

That would require an emulator product, and Fusion (and all other VMware products) are virtualization products.  So personally I would doubt it.

[ColoradoMarmot]

No one can virtualize older MacOS versions on M1 machines.  As he said, don't count on it ever happening.  Emulation even for virtualization-friendly OS's is darn near impossible with decent performance and stability, and OSX is definitely not emulation friendly.

The reality is that if you need Intel guests, run an intel machine.

[Soletetera]

I asked this question because I have UTM running with Snow Leopard on the Mac M1 and it runs with perfect stability. I'm interested in doing it with VmWare so I can import my old virtual machine. If UTM can, I think VmWare could too.

[Technogeezer]

The difference is that UTM uses QEMU to emulate Intel CPU in full system emulation mode.  Not something that virtualization products provide.

Is it possible that VMware (or Parallels) could include a emulator in their product? I would think that the answer is yes, it's technologically possible. 

Is it likely? Probably not. It's a massive change in direction for VMware to provide complete chipset emulation. VMware's core competency is in virtualization, not CPU emulation. You could say "well just build in QEMU", but now you're expecting VMware to become QEMU experts. It

I also don't think Intel emulation aligns with how they view the desktop hypervisor products in the grand scheme of things. They're looking at supporting developers in today's cloud and containerized development methodologies (take a look at what they're doing and positioning with their Tanzu product). 

 One could argue whether there'd be a return on the investment. 

The other thing to take into account is whether emulation would give you the performance that you expect.

[ColoradoMarmot]

It's that performance and stability caveat in my post that's the key (and what VMWare has cited).  Plus, the commercial market for such a capability is likely to be very small, for a very high cost.  OSX guests have issues regardless of emulation because of the 3d issues, and while very old ones might work, I'd be very surprised if later ones work at all.  Keep in mind that 10.6 is almost 20 years old at this point.  It's not remotely safe to have connected to the internet - probably time to let it head off into the sunset.  I have zero expectations of VMWare (or any other commercial vendor) building an emulator.

And I wonder if/how Apple's EULA fits into all that too.  It allows on 'apple hardware' but I suspect there's some circumvention that has to be done technically to get it to work - if so, that's something commercial vendors just won't do.