Technogeezer's Accepted Solutions

@fusion_user2421 wrote: Hi there, I'm trying to enable Virtualization on a Windows 11 Arm running on Fusion 13.5 through an Apple M1 Processor. When I boot to the Windows 11 BIOS it looks very bare bones, and I don't see any option for 'Virtualization Technology' or 'SVM Mode'. Has anyone had success doing this? Does Fusion 13.5 support Virtualization? Not on Apple Silicon. . Nested virtualization isn’t supported by Apple on Apple Silicon Macs, so Fusion can’t support it. That also means that Windows technologies such as WSL 2 and Hyper-V don’t work. WSL 1 does because it doesn’t need nested virtualization. The M1 cpu doesn’t have the hardware support for nested virtualization. It has been reported that the M2 (and maybe M3) do, but Apple has yet to enable that in their virtualization frameworks in macOS. 

There's no need to try to extract an ISO to install it. I'd avoid trying to install things from a VMware shared folder. If that ISO was ripped from a Photoshop Elements install ISO, why not just configure your VM's virtual CD/DVD drive to that ISO file and let it mount to the VM?

This is due to Fusion 13.5 removing ThinPrint virtual printing from the product (see the 13.5 release notes). There's no fix for that, and the message is harmless (although virtual printers are no longer available in the VM and you'll have to figure out another way to print from the VM ). To get rid of the message, edit the .vmx file manually and remove 3 lines (two referencing serial0 and one additional one referencing "thinprint".

I'm running a US English language Windows 11 ARM VM. No problems with Notepad here:   I rather think this is a Microsoft issue rather than anything to do with Fusion. I'm going to download the German ISO and see if I can reproduce. One thought here given what you've said. Microsoft does not include some of the "default" apps in the image. They will be auto-downloaded from the Microsoft Store either after installation or at first launch. I've seen where for at least 1 non-English language, Microsoft did not include the Microsoft Store in the ISO image. No Store, no download. Check to see if you have the Microsoft Store app in your VM. If not, open a command prompt as administrator, then run wsreset.exe -i and wait for the Microsoft Store to install (you can track progress through Windows notification. Then go to the Store and see if there is an update/installation of Microsoft Notepad available. - paul

I was able to reproduce this given your settings. Your VM is mis-configured for use with Centos 9 Stream From what I see, i'm surmising that when you created the virtual machine, you chose "Other Linux 6.x 64-bit Arm" as your guest OS type. That probably will work as a guest OS type, but it sets the memory for a newly created VM to 768 MB and a 8GB hard disk. Both are too small. Red Hat recommends a minimum of 1.5 GB of memory for RHEL 9, and I would go for that as an absolute minimum for Centos 9 Stream - and practically speaking I'd recommend more.  The CentOS 9 Stream partitioner will complain if you have a disk smaller than 9.1 GB as well.  Just FYI - Centos 9 Stream ships with a Linux 5.x kernel, not a 6.x kernel. The better choice for a Centos 9 Stream VM is a guest OS type of "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 64-bit Arm". That will set the VM's memory to 2 GB and the virtual hard drive to 20GB by default.  Here's how I'd fix your VM to run properly (I did this and it fixed the problems that were the same as yours): Shut down the VM Go into the VM's settings In the "General" panel, change the guest operating system type to "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 64-bit Arm". In the "Processors & Memory" panel increase the memory to 4 GB. In the "Hard Drive (NVMe)" panel, check the size of the virtual hard disk. If it is set to 8GB, increase it to 20 GB. Then reboot the VM and restart the installer.    

The restricted virtual machine feature was removed in Workstation 16. See the Workstation 16 release notes https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Workstation-Pro/16/rn/VMware-Workstation-16-Pro-Release-Notes.html

You’re not missing something. Workstation 17.5 is. If you read the 17.5 release notes, you’ll find that VMware removed the virtual printing / thinprint feature with no advance notice and no alternate feature.  Your options vary and range from configuring network printers in the VM printing to PDF in the VM and moving the PDF to the host to print.   

If it were me, I'd use the tool built into Fusion 13.5 to build a release channel Windows 11 22H2 ISO from Microsoft (same as what Parallels does). Then install from that and stay on the release channel. There's really no need for the majority of people to be running anything other than the release channel versions - especially now that Fusion 13.5 has a built in mechanism to obtain release channel ISO of Windows 11 ARM "from Microsoft".  That being said, I've also successfully installed the Insider Preview Beta Channel release by converting the VHDX file found on the Windows Insider web site. That will put you on the Beta Channel flights and updates as Microsoft releases updates to the Beta channel. I keep it around for testing and making sure that things work as Microsoft updates Windows.  I;'ve kept those up to date religiously whenever the updates have been offered (it started out on 22621 releases, and I installed the optional 22331 version to enable the beta features. That in turn got updated recently to 22635 as Microsoft decided to release many of the 23H2 features as an update to the 22H2 release channel. 

FYI you don't have all of Hyper-V disabled. The Monitor mode is being shown as ULM, which indicates Hyper-V is in use. I'd shut down Workstation and copy the folder holding the VM to another location before doing anything else. Then, see the advice in KB article https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1006111 where it discusses deleting the .vmss and .lck (if they exist) files, then making sure that the .vmx file correctly reflects the state of the virtual machine. 

The  use of VMware's  DHCP server was discontinued briefly for Big Sur so yes, those files did not exist. And since they used Apple's implementation inobody could figure out a way to modify it to hard-wire addresses. VMware did re-introduce use of their own DHCP server in Fusion 12 (not sure which release, but I know it was present in 12.2.x) when it discovered it was running on Monterey and later.  I just tried this in Fusion 13.5 running on Sonoma for a VM that was configured for NAT networking. I changed the vmnet8/dhcpd.conf below the "DO NOT MODIFY" section to hard wire the IP address for the MAC address of the VM and added the following  (my NAT segment is 172.26.101.0/24) : host myhost {         hardware ethernet xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;xx;         fixed-address 172.16.101.xx; } My VM picked up the hard-wired address, and not one from the DHCP range.  

Your Windows VMs that run on your old Intel Mac will not work on an Apple Silicon Mac. Not under Fusion and not under Parallels. The only version of Windows that runs on Fusion is windows 11 and in particular the ARM version of Windows 11   There no silver bullet or magic tool that will “convert” what you have. You will need to build a new Windows 11 ARM VMs on the M2 Mac and migrate your data and applications to the new VM. You can not upgrade those VMs in-place because Microsoft does not provide a tool to “upgrade” a system running Intel Windows to ARM Windows. Think along the lines of “what would you do if you had an old computer running Windows and now have a brand new computer that won’t run your old version of Windows?” You would be looking at some things like copying your old data to a disk that you could attach to a new VM to more creative tactics such as attaching the virtual disks of the old VM to a new VM to copy data. You will need to make sure that your old applications run on windows 11 ARM and in some cases may need to upgrade or replace apps depending on what you find.

One thought. This smells network related but not Fusion related. Double check /etc/hosts and make sure that the entry for the 127.0.1.1 interface reflects the hostname you selected for the VM. A mismatch here between the hostname and the hosts file will cause delays in network IP address resolutions, which both Firefox and apt rely on.

A couple of things off the top of my head you might want to look into. There was one poster during the tech preview beta period that had an issue with an application running slowly for no apparent reason. One thing he tried was to turn off 3D acceleration and his application then ran much better. That's something to try and to see if it makes any difference. One other user posted that he was seeing screen flickering and other anomalies. He checked to make sure that the shared graphics in memory setting the VM's Display setting was set to 8192 - the recommended setting.   

> Did I miss the memo? Yes you did. Refer to the Fusion 13.5 release notes. https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Fusion/13.5/rn/vmware-fusion-135-release-notes/index.html Thinprint was removed in 13.5. I have a bit of criticism for VMware for not giving more advance notice and not providing an alternative or workaround   However workarounds do exist. The easiest is to switch to bridged networking. Any reasonably modern printer can be configured using wireless printing discovery, or you can use traditional mechanisms to configure printers just as if you were a physical machine. If using NAT networking, enable printer sharing on the Mac. The VM should them be able to discover it as a networked printer. 

You may wish to go to the menu bar, then VMware Fusion > Settings. >  Keyboard & Mouse Then click the Mac Host shortcuts tab, and unselect "Enable Mac OS Host Keyboard Shortcuts". See if that  works any better for you.  (the downside of that setting is that some Mac keyboard shortcuts won't be available when keyboard focus is with the VM).

Minor versions updates (e.g. 16.1, 17.0.2) to the major version (16 or 17) that you're running are free. Anything involving a major version change (e.g. 16 to 17) are version upgrades and are not free (except in very certain circumstances where you bought a new prior version licences within about a few months of the release of a new major version).  As an example the following update paths are free: 16.1 to 16.1.1 16.1.1 to 16.1.2 16.1 to 16.2 17.0 to 17.0.2 The following are not free because they involve a major version upgrade 16.2.5 to 17.0 16.1 to 17.0.2 There are no "time limits" on when you can get them from VMware's product download site that you get to through Customer Connect or downloads.vmware.com. VMware maintains downloads of versions of Workstation Player and Pro from 14.0 onward. It's not guaranteed though when Vmware will drop downloads of old versions of products. Note that product update (minor) releases are generally cumulative. In general, it's advisable to be on the latest minor release of a major version to make sure you have all the latest bug fixes and security remediations. (and yes, there are exceptions, please read the release notes to make the decision for yourself).  

Tony,  First forget about anything you've downloaded from VMware. The file "darwin.iso" that you've download is not the right one. It does not contain the version of Tools that is required for 10.7 Lion and will not install. Unfortunately VMware does not seem to make it easy to find and download the right version from their web sites.  However, you don't need to download a thing from VMware. Everything you need is contained in Fusion 13.  Here's what to do: Assuming you have Fusion 13 installed and the Lion VM is shut down, go to Finder on your Mac, select  “Go”, then “Go to Folder…” When asked for a folder, type in “/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Library/isoimages/x86_x64”, then type Enter. You will then see a list of .iso and .plist files - these are the VMware Tools files that are bundled with Fusion: While holding the Option key, drag the file “darwinPre15.iso” to the Desktop. NOT DARWIN.ISO. This will make a copy of the file in a place that is easily found by Fusion for the next steps. Now, switch to Fusion. In the Fusion Virtual Machine Library, open the Settings on the Lion VM, then click on the CD/DVD drive. Use the pull-down to “Choose a disc or disc image…”  A dialog will open. Use it to select the ‘darwinPre15.iso” file that you moved to your Desktop. Then click  Open. You will be returned to the CD/DVD setting dialog. Make sure the “Connect CD/DVD Drive” box is checked, then close the Settings window. Now power up your  Lion VM.  After you log into the VM, the VMware Tools installer "CD" should be visible. Depending on your VM’s settings, it should be visible on its Desktop, or in the sidebar of a Finder window.  Open the Tools installer drive if Lion did not do it for you automatically. Double click on “Install VMware Tools”. The installer will start.  The installer may warn about an expired certificate. If it does, elect to continue because you know what you’re doing.  When installation is finished, the installer will reboot the VM.  After reboot you may eject the VMware Tools install CD from the VM. You may also move the 'darwinPre15.iso" file from your Desktop to the Trash as it's no longer needed. You can also modify the VM's settings to uncheck the "Connect CD/DVD drive" option.     

You can't drop the Lion installer dmg nor a cloned dmg onto the "create a new virtual machine" dialog. Neither of those are bootable and that's why you aren't seeing anything boot.  Apple in its infinite wisdom did not create a bootable installer for Lion. It only gave you a .dmg with an Installer package that you had to then run to install "Install Mac OS X Lion.app" into your Applications folder. Further complicating things, if you are running a later Mac, Apple again in its infinite wisdom refused to let you install the "Install Mac OS X Lion.app" from the .dmg, saying that the application can not run on your computer. I've found a way to get that installer App courtesy of Mr. Macintosh (https://mrmacintosh.com). One of the tools he recommends to obtain macOS installation media is an open source utility Mist (macOS Installer Super Tool - https://github.com/ninxsoft/Mist ). This is a tool that runs on Monterey and later. It provides a nice GUI interface to download macOS installers as far back as 10.7.5 - even on Macs that can't run them. I just used it to download and extract the Lion installer app and then dragged/dropped the resulting installer app onto the Fusion Create a new virtual Machine dialog. The VM booted to the OS X Lion installer. 

There are no settings in the VM that will help you with this. The workarounds are all Windows OS tweaks due to the interaction of Workstation, Hyper-V, and 12th gen Core CPUs. (and it's not clear really who's to blame, so don't automatically blame VMware. I believe Microsoft shoulders some of the blame here as well). Try the following first: Open a command prompt on Windows as administrator, and run the following command to disable power throttling on a VM (for some reason, Windows wants to run VM virtual CPUs on E-Cores, not P-Cores) powercfg /powerthrottling disable /path "C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation\x64\vmware-vmx.exe" If that doesn't work, you'll need to disable Windows' use of Hyper-V technology entirely in order to force the use of the VMware hypervisor and not Hyper-V: Make sure anything virtualization or Hyper-V related is uninstalled in Windows (check in Add/Remove Windows Features). Disable Memory Integrity/VBS settings by opening Windows Settings and navigate to  Windows Security -> Device Security -> Core Isolation then turn off the "Memory Integrity" slider Disable any Hyper-V activity by opening a command prompt as administrator and issuing the following:  bcdedit /set hypervisorlaunchtype off Note that this precludes the use of WSL2 as WSL2 needs Hyper-V components.