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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

> 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?

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...

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.

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.