VMware Fusion for Apple Silicon Public Tech Preview Now Available | Hacker News Reader

VMware Fusion for Apple Silicon Public Tech Preview Now Available

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70 pointsackatz68 comments

We don’t plan to support installing or running x86 VMs on Macs with Apple silicon.

What about x86 emulation?

We get asked regularly about running x86 VMs on M1 Macs. It makes total sense… If Apple can emulate x86 with Rosetta 2, surely VMware can do something too, right?

Well, the short answer is that there isn’t exactly much business value relative to the engineering effort that is required, at least for the time being. For now, we’re laser focused on making Arm Linux VMs on Apple silicon a delight to use.

So, to be a bit blunt, running x86 operating systems on Apple silicon is not something we are planning to deliver with this project. Installing Windows or Linux from an x86 ISO, for example, will not work.

https://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2021/04/fusion-on-apple-...

That seems like a bold move. I would have expected that 90% wanted a Fusion exclusively to be able to run x86 operating systems.

That would be the only reason I would continue to pay for the product. Prepping a VM on my desktop to move into VSphere or running an older Mac OS to run 32-bit software are my use cases.

x86 is dying in front of our eyes. I've been using M1 exclusively for work for couple of months. I was a bit sceptical, initially I thought tons of stuff will not work. But all except one thing works perfectly. That one thing being mssql server. Microsoft provides azure flavoured ARM docker image for mssql but it's shit slow - so slow I can't use it for development. So I'm running Ubuntu on Ryzen in the background (no monitor, just multipass/docker/k8s <<btw. multipass is awsome to spin vms using local dhcp - vms just feel like physical boxes>>). Once Microsoft provides mssql docker image for ARM, I'm ready to drop all Intel/AMD heaters, maybe after winter season?

ps. currently 2 out of 459 processes on my desktop are running in x86 emulation; sourcetree and some speech synthesis thing.

Conversely, I got an M1 machine for work and I've found that it's pretty useless unless your workload has been specifically tuned for it (like YouTube browsing or Twitter scrolling). There's no way in hell I'm using Rosetta to compile my x86 binaries, especially on a professional basis.

Well, I just got a new Thinkpad. In it, Ryzen 59something.

Granted, I never got to try M1s, but this is plenty faster than my the Macbook Pro "16 for anything, and I hardly ever hear the fan. Battery life is still something that Apple has an upper hand on, but other than that, x86 seems to still be doing well.

Dying? We have one decent ARM CPU that is limited to specific locked down platform/manufacturer. I believe that "x86 is dying" when the situation is reversed.

Exactly. I have a lot of dev toolchains that are basically VMs -- the fact that I can't use them on the M1 is the thing keeping from jumping ship to the M1. I can't be the only person for whom this is true. I'm really surprised that nobody has done this yet, even if it's slow.

QEMU does do x86 emulation (and UTM provides a nice frontend) but it's not something I'd want to use often as the speed is horrendous.

Same here. Working with a new Dell XPS15 instead now.

I feel like 95% of the use case for UI’d virtualization is running Windows, and being unable to do so I suspect they will lose most of their business?

I could very well be wrong here, but I don’t think running Desktop Linux in a VM is a very large market, and I would just use Docker to run CLI tools. There aren’t really any Killer X Windows Apps that won’t run natively on macOS?

Windows is available for ARM, and it supports emulation of x86 apps just like Rosetta. I am using it right now on Parallels and it works fine for me.

I suspect they just don't want to publicly commit to Windows compatibility due to licensing issues.

> Windows is available for ARM, and it supports emulation of x86 apps just like Rosetta.

Not really. It is a long way behind Rosetta.

(Partially because Apple only built the M1 to be optimised for running Mac apps in emulation, partially because Apple had spent five years deprecating older software very aggressively so nobody expected those things to work, partially because it's genuinely hard, and partially because it's not very good.)

It's not really readily available either, only a preview build.

The licensing concerns do play a factor. VMware also makes it difficult to run Mac OS VMs on Workstation for the same reason.

(Source: I recently left VMware)

I believe Parallels has chosen to ignore/sidestep the licensing issues by using the Windows Client ARM64 Insider Preview builds. We'll have to see what happens when the Insider Preview builds stop being produced.

The Insider program has offered continuous builds since 2014 when they moved to a regular release cadence so it's not likely this will change unless something drastic happens to the versioning in which case licensing models would also change anyways.

What the Insider ARM builds did give you that hasn't been in a release version (until tomorrow) was x86-64 emulation support and a few other minor ARM improvements and an easy way to source a compiled ISO directly from Microsoft.

As far as activating a standard Windows 10 license will activate Windows 10/11 for ARM even if the EULA says it won't and, regardless, switching to Insider builds doesn't sidestep licensing as you need to be licensed to join a PC to the program and the ISO installer has the same licensing and EULA requirements as a normal installer ISO.

This, I'm running Win Preview Arm64 + ArcGIS on an M1 Air through Parallels, no issues so far.

yes, but will it run CRYsis?

Same here. Remember Connectix (later Microsoft) Virtual PC? To run x86 Windows on your PPC Macintosh? That's the sort of gap I thought VMware was waiting to fill before releasing the new VMware Fusion. What a let down.

This is a tech preview (“public beta”), not a release. And they won’t be releasing a new paid version of Fusion this year, so this will stay a free public beta for a while.

Also, VMware is ready to add ARM64 Windows support if Microsoft creates a legitimate way to license it.

Indeed. Looking at my usage, it is:

99% running Linux, mostly a VM on which I run copies of most of my employer's non-infrastructure software for development and testing.

0.9% running Windows.

0.1% running MacOS. Generally this is only when I've found some bug and want to reproduce it on a clean system to make sure it is not just due to something I misconfigured before reporting it.

Is Debian ARM Linux going to work on an M1 under VMware Fusion? If so, maybe I'd still find VMware Fusion useful on an M1 (we use Debian at work, and I'm fine using Debian for my personal VMs that need Linux).

Very much. I have a bunch of Windows x64 VMs that I do not want to convert to ARM (even just for the time it would take to migrate over to new VMs), plus a x64 Windows 7 VM.

The value of virtual machines is to be able to virtualise a specific platform! That Win7 machine has software that needs to keep running. There is no Win10 porting or equivalent.

What do you expect after they fired everyone working on Fusion and outsourced to India?

It’s 100% possible to implement this, VMWare is just a second-rate virtualization platform these days.

Don’t buy their product. Ever.

https://www.theregister.com/2016/01/27/vmware_fusion_and_wor...

That's an unnecessarily xenophobic way of saying what the article does, which is that VMWare has decided to shift their focus to server virtualization at the cost of desktop virtualization. They're a business, and if they're making more money from one product line than the other, it's their choice to abandon the one. Don't buy the product if you don't like that, sure, but there's no reason to disparage outsourcing as the problem here.

Xenophobia has nothing to do with it.

It’s just a matter of fact they fired/restructured/outsourced, whatever the hell you want to call it, so they could hire cheaper developers to simply maintain the product.

VMWare would almost certainly offer this capability if it wouldn’t require the outsourced team 2x, 3x, …, 10x the amount of time it would would have taken the team who originally built the software.

You're completely off the mark. Fusion doesn't support x86 workloads on top of ARM largely because the ARM fork of ESXi doesn't support x86 workloads on top of ARM (and AFAIK, there's no future plans to, either).

Fusion and Workstation inherit most of their underlying capabilities from ESXi. Barring a few functionality/usability flourishes unique to workstation/desktop use cases...if ESXi doesn't do it, Fusion and Workstation won't.

The particular event that article references was part of a long term restructuring. Presently, there are many US, European, and Indian developers that still contribute to Workstation and Fusion. There's also significant overlap 'under the hood' with the ESXi code base.

As for VMware's platform being second rate - there's still not really a lot of serious competition in the on-prem world, especially if any kind of scale, extreme performance needs or operational complexity is required. Nitro certainly runs circles around it in some regards, but that's not really an option that's on the table for big on-prem shops.

> So, to be a bit blunt, running x86 operating systems on Apple silicon is not something we are planning to deliver with this project. Installing Windows or Linux from an x86 ISO, for example, will not work.

I have to question, then, what is Fusion meant to do? I have primarily used it to install x86 OSes.

They wrote that. I read “We’re about to close shop because we couldn’t figure this out.”

Parallel’s icon literally has a Windows logo in it.

I don't think Parallels emulates x86 windows either, does it?

"We get asked regularly about running x86 VMs on M1 Macs."

Sort of like Ford gets asked regularly about driving their cars on interstate highways ?

This is not a fringe feature or some weird corner-case ... this is the reason people buy your product.

Right? Their response comes off a bit arrogant.

Probably a lot less arrogant than it sounds. They probably share a whole lot of tooling between platforms. Emulation just isn’t in their skill set anywhere.

Desktop is a niche for VMware, and Mac a niche within that. It seems pretty straightforward that perhaps this product doesn’t pay for a whole new engineering skill set.

I still don't understand why people thought the hypervisor vendors would magically be able to provide x86 Win environments on M1 Macs that worked like x86 Win environments on Intel macs.

Virtualization isn't emulation. Expecting seamless execution of x86 Win code on an M1 Mac seems unreasonable to me. I was initially concerned about this, but I realized that I've almost completely stopped using local VMs at all in favor of VMs in our datacenter, and so ...

Modern "programmers" don't know how computer work. Film at 11.

Virtualization isn't emulation, but emulation can be used for the same effect, to run VM images.

That's where VMware started: The original VMware product started the whole x86 VM field before Intel provided any virtualization capabilities. VMware's first product, able to run Windows VMs smoothly in a window, was amazing compared to what had come before, and they did it before there were any x86 features for virtualization, using clever code scanning and emulation techniques. It's not at all obvious that they couldn't use similar clever techniques again, combined with Rosetta 2 style JIT - if they wanted to.

I don't think people were expecting magic but when we had x86 emulators to run Windows/DOS VMs back in the PPC and even 68k days with programs like SoftPC and Virtual PC being readily available and usable for business applications at least I can't really blame people for expecting Parallels and VMware to pivot their products to meet that need that was essentially what most people were using it in the first place for.

I mean, I've definitely met a number of folks who just assumed that running x86 Windows on M1 would work just the same as running it on an Intel Mac.

As you note, emulation products existed prior to the Intel switch, and they would do in a pinch, but they were VERY slow because emulation != virtualization. Doing anything complex in an emulated environment was PAINFUL.

Running Windows in a Parallels or VMWare virtual machine on my Intel Mac works VERY well, but no emulation product will deliver that level of performance.

You could of course virtualize ARM Windows on an M1, I suppose, but then you're not in an Intel environment, and the ARM Windows software landscape is thin.

I run Windows Arm64 11 beta with Parallels and it can emulate x86/64 apps well enoug even on 4.5k resolution things are very snappy. And I run pcon planner which is a 3d modeling program which worked fine. Not sure exact speed though.

I run Visual Studio on it with an old version of ASP.NET

It works totally fine

I've been running Arm64 windows 10 on parallels on an M1 mac, and I also found most x86/64 windows apps run well. This approach seems much more feasible as the long term path, to let MS and appmakers fix compatibility over time, than expect an entire x86 operating system will be virtualized well enough to the point it is stable also all apps running on it are stable.

I hope vmware fusion works as well because Parallels has become annoying over the years. You can buy a permanent license instead of a subscription, but you have to upgrade every time MacOS has a major update anyway.

I wonder if Apple realizes where this is going for developers that don't only do web stuff.

No x86 VMs from either virtualization product means I also need a x86 box around. What does that lead to? I'm no longer a Mac Pro customer, just a Mac Mini customer. And I'll be running Linux as the main OS on the x86 box, which I haven't done in ages.

Are they trying to push Linux/x86 adoption? :)

Edit: at least they were honest enough to announce the transition early. I would have bought a new Mac Pro last year otherwise.

Developers are quite a small segment of Apple's customer base. They're simply trying to improve the experience of their devices for consumer use cases. As long as you have a mac of some sort and are developing for their platform then that's all they need.

> Developers are quite a small segment of Apple's customer base.

Yeah, but they're reasonably influential. At least my friends ask me what to buy. Not that I always recommend Apple, but they know I use that exclusively which counts for some mind share. And that will end when I make the jump to arm.

Interestingly my friends relatives usually already have an opinion on mac/windows when wanting computer buying advice. The advice they want is usually just which machine within their chosen ecosystem to buy.

My M1 Macbook Air is getting closer and closer to an iPad with a keyboard. It does not feel like a developer machine at all.

When they announced the transition they said the number of users installing Bootcamp had plumetted. Presumably it's the same for people running Windows under a VM. My guess is they looked at this and decided it wasn't that important.

Of course it did, since Apple just told them it has no future.

What is Fusion providing that Parallels doesn’t already?

Better UI, no scammy "buy our other product" buttons in the app UI, no misleading pricing. I always found Parallels to be quite shady.

I once bought a vmware fusion professional license. It came with threatening emails from vmware marketing to renew my 12 months of support contract (which I never used).

So now I just don't buy the professional version any more. And I'm saying both companies are shady as f*k.

Fusion is free for personal use.

That's a recent thing. Last time i needed to renew it was paid.

Support for disk formats other than Parallels own format. VDMK and VDI and other formats are actually usable on VMWare and VirtualBox but you're out of luck with Parallels.

I just tried both recently. Been using VirtualBox for work and X11 is super slow. With Parallels, X11 ran fine but I couldn't get OpenGL to work with Parallels Tools installed (actually nothing that used OpenGL would work).

With VMware Fusion, OpenGL worked out of the box and Extreme Tux Racer and ShaderToy ran fine.

Also, in VMware Fusion I could disable all MacOS-shortcuts (like Spotlight and switching spaces) while the VM is in full screen... With Parallels I would always switch spaces by accident because I couldn't find a way to disable everything...

Free account for personal use?

Well Parallels is owned by Corel now but Fusion isn't.

I am having both products and currently I prefer VMWare. One of the biggest reasons is, that all necessary drivers for Linux inside VMWare are part of the Linux distributions - e.g. CentOS and Fedora run without extra drivers installed.

Parallels brings their own drivers to install, which means not every Linux version is supported, the last time I tried it was lacking drivers for the newer kernels, this seems to have improved somewhat.

VMWare requires a few more clicks to configure with the upside that you have a clear configuration process so little magic is happening in the background - Parallels seems to automatically mount your drives in the VM which often is not what I want it to do.

Also, VMWare supports platforms beyond the Mac, so if you have a mixed environment, you can even move VMs between e.g. Windows and Mac machines.

It's worth noting that the reason this took so long is that VMWare ported their in-house hypervisor instead of using Apple's Hypervisor.framework (or it's higher level counterpart Virtualization.framework).

I wonder if that means we'll ever get a ESXi port to Apple Silicon. I doubt it, but what other reason is there to go through all this trouble?

Internal rumor also had it that VMware got blindsided by Apple's M1 announcement (as opposed to Parallels, who got invited to do a demo at launch). As a former employee (that admittedly only had indirect visibility into such things), relations between the two firms are generally not friendly.

The Hypervisor.Framework was already being used for VMware Fusion 12. It is the main reason behind a lot of the current complaints, like poor performance and network connection issues under certain conditions.

There's more than one reason for this VMware to take more time. One of them being that VMware Fusion is part of a bigger picture, like that Fusion needs to work with VMware vSphere from day one.

FWIW, there's already ESXi on Arm. I don't know how much more work it is to get that to work on Apple Silicon assuming you are talking about "run it on the metal and not as a VM". Pretty sure they will investigate that route to see how much extra work it is.

As a paying customer, I am royally annoyed with what VMware delivered so far. The latest major version of Fusion has broken networking (port forwards). They promised it was gonna get fixed in Jan/Feb bug fix release but all they did is removed it from Release notes / Known Issues section. I had to $100 for it to somewhat work on BS.

Their slow implementation of virtualization is just another piece to the puzzle. Realize that while Parallels was super quick to deliver, even docker was faster than the “worlds leader in virtualization “.

Fusion and Workstation are miniscule contributors to VMware's revenue, and represent what amounts to a rounding error in terms of install base. While still profitable to maintain, they are not anywhere close to top priorities for VMware.

Parallels also appears to have had early access to M1 that VMware did not.

What exactly needs to be done for something to utilize Apple Silicon?

I have no idea. I have a computer science degree and I could only ever hope to understand it with cute metaphors.

So for my cute metaphor, which I look forward to improvements, I think of the general problem as "we need to run a business" as an analogue of "we need to run an operating system and some programs"; the machine architecture is the amalgamation of tools and techniques.

So if a business springs up as the form of a restaurant, and that business as operating system learns how to create successful patterns using spatulas and fryolators and hot plates, then to move your business to a farm that has tractors and shovels and troughs, you basically have to start all over with your implementation even if your business plan is the same.

But, as those patterns become satisfied, of "get my pile of stuff moved from this container to that container", the issue of plates and troughs becomes solved and you get rapid springs forward of completing your task of migrating.

I have no credentials to answer this basically but that's how I imagine it.

The blog post is short on what the preview enables. I assume this allows for running Intel-based images on Apple Silicon, the achieved emulation performance would be most interesting to know.

It enables running Linux ARM based VMs on macOS.

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