It’s been a few months since our informal announcement via Twitter back in November where we committed to delivering VMware VMs on Apple silicon devices, so we wanted to take this opportunity to share a bit about how our progress with our little project to bring Fusion to life on Apple silicon Macs this year. But first, we are about to discuss the necessity of the Virtual Machine solution applications as there are many people who do not know why. In this article, we will discuss the alternatives to VMware Workstation for all the OS out there for both casual and professional usages and we will discuss both the free and commercial type of applications.We will be delivering a Tech Preview of VMware Fusion for macOS on Apple silicon this year. VMware Fusion 11.5 makes provisioning Windows, MacOS or Linux virtual machines on a Mac simple. A Commercial License can be applied to enable Workstation Player to run Restricted Virtual Machines created by VMware Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro.How To Install VMware Workstation 15.5 On Any Computer.macOS VMs are not in scope in the short term. Insider builds of Windows 10 ARM may only be installed on systems with a licensed version of Windows 10, which is currently not available on Apple hardware. Microsoft currently does not sell licenses of Windows 10 ARM for virtual machines. Windows is second priority behind Linux We don’t plan to support installing or running x86 VMs on Macs with Apple silicon.
Is There A Vmware Workstation Free And CommercialThat means it’s time for us to innovate and rebuild our beloved desktop hypervisor for Macs, VMware Fusion, to support the next generation of Apple hardware. For the most part, apps ‘ just work’, even if they’re a bit slower.However, for those that need to run another operating system like Linux or Windows, Rosetta 2 doesn’t support Virtualization, and Apple silicon Macs don’t support Boot Camp. With the new architecture comes incredible performance gains, thermal improvements, and dramatically improved battery life, but poses some unique challenges for virtualization apps like Fusion Pro and Player.With first generation of Apple silicon chips, namely the M1, Apple has made significant performance and efficacy improvements, with claims of “Up to 2.8x CPU performance Up to 5x the graphics speed Up to 11x faster machine learning And up to 20 hours of battery life” on a new 13” MacBook Pro.Seeing improvements like that, it comes as no surprise to us that when users got their hands on M1 devices they naturally wanted to run virtual machines on them! Why not take advantage of that extra CPU power and carry around a single notebook instead of 2 laptops, right? We agree.In much the same way they did when moving from PowerPC to Intel CPUs back in 2006, Apple introduced a new version of Rosetta to support running Intel apps on Apple silicon. This is super important to us and to our customers, particularly as more and more operational workflows become automated.Now, we’re no stranger to Arm CPUs, having shipped what is currently a something we call a Fling with ESXi Arm Edition. Developers and Operations teams can move VMs and templates between data centers, desktops, and clouds with ease. A VMware VM behaves pretty much the same regardless of what product it’s running on. As a side project, this small group were able to essentially rebuild Workstation to run on the Mac using Apple’s UI, thus creating the foundation of what we now know as VMware FusionOne of the benefits our users appreciate of having older “enterprise-grade” siblings with Workstation on the desktop and ESXi in the data center is that it gives organizations a consistent operating model. Disk utility for mac erase with imagesYep.Of course, just booting a bunch of VMs that are mostly idle isn’t quite a ‘real world experience’, nor is it the same as doing some of the stress testing that we perform in the leadup to a release. 6 different Linux flavors and 1 FreeBSD… MacBook Air. Still runs 20 degrees (Celsius) cooler than my Intel Mac Mini Same VMs as above but in separate windows, elegantly viewed with Expose.You can see here that I have 7 ARM VMs booted at once… 2 are CLI only (Photon and BSD), the others are full desktops… each is configured with 4CPU and 8GB of RAM. ESXi is designed to be enterprise-grade, which includes security, resiliency and performance benefits that both Fusion and Workstation get to benefit from.Here’s a couple of screenshots from my test desktop, a M1 MacBook Air with 8 CPU + 8GPU cores and 16GB of RAM: You can see 7 VMs booted in the Library window, with Fedora 34 up front and Ubuntu 21.04 in the Preview window. This is a much different task that simply shipping a single product like Fusion to say the least! So, how’s it going?Well, our initial assessments are going very well! For starters, we have VMs booting in a variety of Arm operating systems, and we are very impressed with the performance!Because of our kinship with ESXi, we have a major architectural advantage over our competition. Being able to build on top of what we’ve learned with our still-evolving Fling has been crucial, and thankfully we have some overlap in the teams’ history, meaning folks have exactly the right experience needed for this project.To support Fusion on M1 devices, while maintaining code and feature compatibility with our ecosystem, we are essentially bringing the core of these two projects together. Where is android emulator file locationed macIs part of what enables the features that work between host and guest. Is included by default with most Linux distributions Currently, open-vm-tools are not readily available on the aarch64 (Arm) platform. Sounds good, so what’s the hold up?While booting all that at once and it being usable ( which it all has been in my testing) is an impressive feat in itself, we do still have a ways to go, and some challenges along the way.For instance, the best Linux VM experience comes by installing VMware Tools, and by and large Tools are included with every Linux distribution. Windows 10 Pro or Enterprise, build 19559 or newerYou can see it doesn’t say anything about Apple silicon. We have reached out to Microsoft for comment and clarification on the matter.For the time being, our work has been focused on Linux guest operating systems, and we’re confident that if Microsoft offers Windows on Arm licenses more broadly, we’ll be ready to officially support it. Windows 10 ARM-based PCs with a Microsoft SQ1, Microsoft SQ2, Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx, or Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 processor Creating ARM64 VMs is not supported on x64 hardware.ARM64 VMs are only supported on devices that meet the pre-requisites: There have been plenty of discussions on the topic from users and the media, and from the Insider Download Page, it reads:With Windows 10 on ARM Insider Preview builds, you can create 64-bit ARM (ARM64) VMs in Hyper-V on Windows 10 ARM-based PCs. With Windows on ARM however, this presents a unique situation, particularly as it relates to Licensing.The Insider Preview program says: “To install Windows 10 Insider Preview Builds, you must be running a licensed version of Windows 10 on your device.” And as far as we are aware, there is no way to buy a Windows 10 ARM license for a Mac with Apple silicon. For now, we’re laser focused on making Arm Linux VMs on Apple silicon a delight to use. 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.
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