Buslogic error/failing importer

[Liroy]

Hi,

First of: the documentation on how to import a VM from third-party hypervisors drastically needs updating as it isn't correct for 12 nor 13. Eventually figured out how to trigger it and imported a Windows 11 ARM VM from Parallels. For good measure, I've added encryption and the TPM as required to support Windows 11 (which isn't documented either).

However, when attempting to start the VM in question it throws an error "The device type "buslogic" specified for "scsi0" is not supported by VMWare Fusion 13.0.0.". And then fails to start.

-EDIT- The same happens to the Fedora ARM virtual machine I tried to import. Exact same error. It looks like any VM you import from Parallels will fail to boot with that "buslogic" error.

I've Google'd my buttocks off trying to find a solution to this problem, but nothing is offered - not even here.
I tried to get in touch with VMWare support since I should have complimentary support with my Fusion Pro 13 purchase, but it turns out the support system doesn't seem to recognise my right to support so I can't open a support ticket in any way.

Hence trying my luck here, hoping someone has any idea please. 🙂

With the broken documentation, broken support, broken importer and the whole range of problems I'm almost tempted to just aks to undo the upgrade. 

[Technogeezer]

Having dealt with the Tech Previews on Apple Silicon over the last year, converting VMs from Parallels was not supported.  It does not appear to have been added in Fusion 13 since there is no "File -> Import" menu on Fusion 13 on Apple Silicon.

The other thing that I found is that the SCSI adapter type that's a default when you select a SCSI virtual disk is a pvscsi virtual controller. In my testing I found that modifying the VMX file to set the virtual device type for a SCSI bus to anything other than pvscsi resulted in this error. So I believed the error message that what I was trying to do wasn't supported.  I believe this behavior carries over to Fusion 13 on Apple Silicon.  

Bottom line: IMO don't waste your time on trying to import ARM virtual machines from Parallels on Fusion 13 on Apple Silicon. 

[Liroy]

@Technogeezer Indeed, there’s no such option contrary to what the documentation says. You must go to Finder and open the .pvm file with VMWare (if it doesn’t default to VMWare after installing Fusion Pro). This triggers the conversion/import process including allowing you to configure the VM and such. It unfortunately fails for any imported VM as it always results in that BusLogic error. 

[Technogeezer]

Agreed that they should have done a much better job on the Fusion 13 documentation, especially on where Fusion differs on Apple Silicon and Intel. Given that the documentation says to use File-> Import to import a Parallels VM, and that option does not exist on Apple Silicon, my expectation is that the operation isn't supported, just like in the Tech Preview.

A note also on what SCSI virtual adapters types are supported would have been nice as well. IMO for the most part Linux and Windows VMs for arm64 work quite nicely with NVMe virtual disks. Every distro that I've thrown at the Tech Preview had support for NVMe disks out of the box. Never had to use SCSI on a Tech Preview VM. 

[ColoradoMarmot]

I confirmed today that this isn't supported on M1 machines.  You've likely stumbled across a partial implementation.