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Sjd181969
Contributor
Contributor

VMware Fusion 12 running on Apple Silicon

Hi

Will Fusion ever operate on macs running on Apple Silicon chips as it’s important that I can continue to run my x64 Linux vm images if I upgrade to a new Apple silicon based Mac 

I couldn’t see any official comment on this from VMware 

 

 

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SvenGus
Expert
Expert

Yes, I've noticed your prior message disappeared. Oddly enough, I received an email with its content, and I think your reflections on Qemu were correct. For the sake of completeness, and supposing the original content was deleted by some operating oddity, I'll quote you now: [...]

EMR, thank you very much (maybe too frequent edits are marked as suspicious and thus the message is hidden...?): I'll repost it now, edited...

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SvenGus
Expert
Expert

BTW, an optimised QEMU, packaged as a macOS app bundle with a nice GUI to manage VMs and a menu bar item, would probably be quite successful for those needing legacy Intel OS emulation on M1 Macs (no need to reinvent the wheel, thus): once there was Q (rather basic, but promising), but it has been discontinued a long time ago; and today sadly there are no Mac-specific QEMU GUI frontends, thus making it more difficult to use (needs command line, and MacPorts or Homebrew).

VMware and/or Parallels could maybe even base an additional "Lite" or "Legacy" version of Fusion and/or Desktop on QEMU, and sell it as a native universal macOS app: who knows, perhaps it could also be convenient from a business point of view...?

More likely that some independent developer (re)makes something like this, anyway...

 

Kees8881
Contributor
Contributor

I will be very curious who will win the M1 race: Parallels or VMWare.

Kees van der Kolk

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nobody456
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

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SvenGus
Expert
Expert

QEMU is a versatile all-purpose emulator and virtualiser, but sadly isn't yet optimised for macOS hosts: this would be one of the problems to solve (of which the achievement in the above link is only a beginning). As ARM on ARM virtualisers, VMware and Parallels could probably be even faster, on Apple Silicon; while on the emulation front, QEMU could indeed be a good base from which to begin (at least in theory), also for third parties. As Graf says: Now, who's up for the task to make it easy to consume for people who just want to run VMs? - which would be a good idea also for future Intel on ARM emulation, on M1 Mac hosts...

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EMR
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

It would be interesting if someone were able to assess the speed of Qemu as an Intel emulator on Apple Silicon hardware. It seems so far a few users have succeeded in running ARM Windows on a non-emulated virtual ARM Qemu, and it is up to ARM Windows to emulate the x86/x64 (?) architecture. But if Qemu were to be used as en emulator, it should be possible to run a regular version of Windows 10 for Intel, along with x86/x64 Windows applications, and, in addition, all OS X/macOS for Intel as virtual machines. It would be great if someone were to check which is faster:

  1. Virtualized ARM Windows emulating Intel Microsoft Word or some other well-known and commonly used application.
  2. Emulated Intel Windows running Intel Microsoft Word or some other well-known and commonly used application.
SvenGus
Expert
Expert

1. Virtualisation of Windows 10 ARM on M1 Mac, with native QEMU (qemu-system-aarch64: quite fast, with hvf acceleration):  https://youtu.be/MhuaGc6MQ_k

(another video here: https://youtu.be/YZtNyoqOlss)

2. Emulation of Windows 7 x86 on M1 Mac, with UTM for i(Pad)OS, which is based on QEMU (still rather slow, but improvable): https://youtu.be/Kn_ATp96xLI

Sofar, I’ve not found any other videos about Windows x86/x64 emulation on M1; but here is an interesting link, anyway: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/windows-running-on-m1-with-qemu-x86-emulation.2270747 (sadly, a not optimized qemu-system-x86_64 emulation still seems to be too slow to be usable, even on the M1)...

SvenGus
Expert
Expert

[Hmmm... my last message disappeared again, after editing: a bug in the forum software (hopefully it wasn’t too off topic: after all, this is a general discussion, not one to solve some specific problem)...?]

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

Well, these are forums for Fusion, not for alternative/competing technologies, so it might be better to take that piece of the conversation to somewhere like macrumors.

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SvenGus
Expert
Expert

OK, no problem... but anyway, keeping one’s previous (Intel) Fusion VMs working also on future M1 Macs is a real and non-trivial issue, which won’t be addressed in the most likely scenario, i.e. with Fusion becoming only an ARM on ARM virtualizer on M1 Macs (without x86/x64 emulation): that was the only reason we also talked a little about QEMU (and other products), which could maybe be useful during the transition...

Uxian
Contributor
Contributor

Parallels just dropped their first developer preview with Silicon support. It's pretty flakey in a lot of respects but allows you to run an ARM64 Ubuntu image successfully. I'm hoping Fusion won't be too far behind since I much prefer it.

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

I saw that, and man there's a lot of limitations.  It feels like they pushed it out just because they wanted to be first.  It's not even what I'd call a tech preview.

I suspect VMWare is a lot better off because they adopted apples hypervisor framework, and parallels kept their own...but we'll see hopefully soon.

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TECH198
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

either i thought i commented somewhere on this forum, or i'm going completely insane ... oh well

 

CrossOver 20.0 has done it on M1.. Parallels as well... you could argue CrossOver is very different beast from emulating hardware as well,, but if Parallels can do it native, then i'm sure VMWare can.. Its more of a question, "do they want to"

https://kb.parallels.com/en/125038

Its just Parallels is there first 🙂 See what happens when you ignore things. Weather its "late to the game" or what, first come, first serve..

 

 

 

 

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VirtualMac2009
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hopefully VMware Fusion will do it as well:

Windows 10 on M1 Macs: What you can do (virtualization, sorta) and can’t (Boot Camp)

https://www.macworld.com/article/3604371/windows-10-on-m1-macs-how-it-works.html

and

How to Test Windows 10 ARM Insider on M1 Macs using Parallels

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/insider_wintp-insider_install/how-to-test-windows-...

 

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ColoradoMarmot
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Champion

Parallels does not emulate x86/64.  It's rather crippled virtualization for ARM guests.  We know VMWare's working on Fusion for ARM guests, just don't have an ETA.

But yeah, I expect the only way to do windows this year is going to be Windows ARM and use it's emulation.  Either that or Apple allows Rosetta 2, probably as part of the new OS.

Can't speak to Crossover, but that's not really a hypervisor, so it may be using Rosetta 2 underneath.

 

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eburton7
Contributor
Contributor

I need a new MacBook Air or Pro.  The MacBook Pro can be configured with an Intel i5 or i7 chip.  Will that solve the problem of not being able to run VM Fusion and Windows virtual machine?   I initially bought one with the M1 chip but it did not work.  

 

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ColoradoMarmot
Champion
Champion

Yup, nothing changes - that's how it always worked.  If you need intel workloads for the foreseeable future, intel machines are the only guarenteed option.

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gringley
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Shouldn't we qualify the Intel statement to indicate that we need Intel CPUs that support hardware virtualization?  We have a number of users who bought MacBook Pros that are not fully functional in Fusion 12 with Apple's virtualization?  How does one or who creates that guide to let us know which Mac Intel CPU options are "safe to buy" for Fusion 12 on Big Sur?

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ColoradoMarmot
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Champion

Fair point, but I believe there's a KB article about it.  In any case, nested virtualization is a pretty niche feature. For the vast majority of Fusion customers it's not an issue.

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gringley
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

I would argue that nested virtualization in Windows is not niche anymore.  MS is using it for browser isolation in Edge - Microsoft Defender Application Guard - so people are going to be using nested virtualization more and more without necessarily realizing that they are doing nested virtualization.

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