jamesdoe Tracker

Re: Running Fusion on an Intel Mac and upgrading to an M1/M2 Mac? Read this first.

jamesdoe — Sat, 18 Feb 2023 05:59:58 GMT

Concur. Now that $M supports it officially, it's time for VMware to step up & polish their implementation & marketing of this important VM use-case.

Re: Running Fusion on an Intel Mac and upgrading to an M1/M2 Mac? Read this first.

jamesdoe — Thu, 15 Dec 2022 03:19:48 GMT

@Technogeezer -

After 3-4 hours of set up, twiddling, fiddling, tweaking, etc. I got it all worked out.

Windows 11 for ARM is impressively fast & responsive under VMWare Fusion 13 for M1 Macs. (Running under OS X 12.6.1 at present.)

I had no problem installing several of my small USB-connected data logging devices & getting their various custom data / RS232 / USB logging x86-compiled Windows apps to install, connect, & download data as-expected.

Glad to finally have an operable Windows 11 environment on my M1-powered Mac.

As an added bonus, of course the M1 CPU continues to operate very cool & the overall (Mac OS X) Activity Monitor CPU levels remain quite low even while I have the Windows 11 virtual machine running. (Assigned it 8GB physical RAM, out of the 32GB RAM available on my laptop.)

Thanks again for writing up that very detailed & completely accurate How-To guide for M1 Fusion w/ Windows 11 ARM. Using the Mac OS X ISO prep & install path worked smooth as butter.

Re: Running Fusion on an Intel Mac and upgrading to an M1/M2 Mac? Read this first.

jamesdoe — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 03:14:48 GMT

After having my old Fusion 11.5 / Intel x86 Windows virtual machines in stasis for the past year or so, I bit the bullet & bought Fusion 13 Player for my MB Pro 16" M1 Pro laptop.

I read the "Fusion 13 For Apple Silicon Companion, v4" document -- thank you very much.

I understand that if I jump through some hoops I can get a recent version of Windows 11, compiled for ARM, running under Fusion 13 on my M1-powered MacBook.

I also understand that said Windows 11-ARM environment will run most or all of the old executables/binaries that I intend to copy over from my Windows 10 x86 virtual machine -- via an x86 emulation layer built into Windows 11 ARM.

How well can I expect the USB 2.0 / 3.0 emulation & serial port/TTY emulation under Windows 11 ARM-running-under-Fusion 13 to work?

I have a series of low-data-rate datalogging apps (for things like air quality sensors, temperature, etc.) which are only available as x86 binaries. I emphasize that these are pretty undemanding -- none of them streams data at much over a few 10s or 100s of kilobits per second. (Kbit/sec.) Not talking about audio-mixing or anything really latency-sensitive here, just general TTY/UART/RS232 comms.

Are they likely to be able to continue to run smoothly & interact well with the USB 2.0/3.0 and serial port (UART) emulation in Windows 11 ARM?

Regards & thanks

Re: The Unofficial Fusion 13 for Apple Silicon Companion

jamesdoe — Wed, 14 Dec 2022 02:55:54 GMT

VMware owes you at least $2,500 compensation for your time & trouble producing this document.

The fact that I had to spend 20 minutes googling & digging through forum posts just to get a coherent understanding of the current structure & limitations of Fusion 13 for M1/M2 series Macs reflects poorly on VMware as a company.

Thank YOU (OP, author of the document) for your time and trouble taken to write & share this doc.