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country_bebop
Contributor
Contributor

Mac Guest and Host Questions

I have a Mac host with macOS 10.14.6 (Mojave) and it has a guest VM also with Mojave.  I want to move the VM to another Intel Mac with Monterey or Ventura and update the VM's hardware version and VMWare tools.  In people's experience, will the VM work at least as well as it does now?  

Should I instead make a new Mojave VM from scratch with Fusion 12.x or 13?  Recommendations?

One last question:  Is the hardware version for VMs running with Fusion 13 version 20?

Thanks for your help.

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

Yep, it should work fine with a couple of caveats. 

Monterey and Ventura have significantly higher load on the host.  So what worked on a 4 core machine under mojave may be underwater on a 4 core machine with ventura.  MacOS needs a minimum of 2 cores and 4GB for the guest, and for ventura hosts I recommend leaving 4 cores and 8GB for the host for good performance.  You may be ok with 2 and 2 for both, but it's looking now like that's the bare minimum.

Make sure you shut down, not suspend, the VM and remove any snapshots.  Then copy it over manually (not time machine) to the new one.  Boot in Fusion 13 and it'll prompt you to upgrade the hardware.  It should prompt to upgrade the tools, but you may have to do that manually.

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country_bebop
Contributor
Contributor

Thanks, you made my day!  My old Mac is 4 core with 16GB RAM and the new Mac is 6 core 64GB RAM so I should be OK.

Anyone else have any caveats or recommendations?

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

I think in your OP you noted it's intel to intel, which is fine.  What you can't do is go from intel to M1.  In that case you'll have to build a new VM, and it'll have to be an M1 enabled version (not mojave).

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country_bebop
Contributor
Contributor

Yes it is intel to intel for the reason you point out.

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