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VMware Fusion for Apple Silicon Public Tech Preview Now Available

70 points by ackatz 5y ago

tvanderb 5y ago
What exactly needs to be done for something to utilize Apple Silicon?
- digitalsushi 5y ago
  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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
petard 5y ago
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.
- frank_sausage 5y ago
  It enables running Linux ARM based VMs on macOS.
protomyth 5y ago
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-silicon-progress-update.html https://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2021/04/fusion-on-apple-...
- ecf 5y ago
  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_workstation_development_team_fired/ https://www.theregister.com/2016/01/27/vmware_fusion_and_wor...
  - eddieroger 5y ago
    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.
    - ecf 5y ago
      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.
656565656565 5y ago
What is Fusion providing that Parallels doesn’t already?
- frank_sausage 5y ago
  Better UI, no scammy "buy our other product" buttons in the app UI, no misleading pricing. I always found Parallels to be quite shady.
  - nottorp 5y ago
    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.
    - sys_64738 5y ago
      Fusion is free for personal use.
      - nottorp 5y ago
        That's a recent thing. Last time i needed to renew it was paid.
- 72deluxe 5y ago
  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.
- kattkunskap 5y ago
  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...
nottorp 5y ago
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.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  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.
  - nottorp 5y ago
    > 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.
    - nicoburns 5y ago
      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.
  - testfoobar 5y ago
    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.
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  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.
CSDude 5y ago
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.
- mettamage 5y ago
  I run Visual Studio on it with an old version of ASP.NET It works totally fine
- johnwalkr 5y ago
  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.
easton 5y ago
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?
- sithadmin 5y ago
  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.
- wila 5y ago
  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.
404mm 5y ago
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 “.
- sithadmin 5y ago
  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.
ubermonkey 5y ago
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 ...
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  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.
  - ubermonkey 5y ago
    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.
- MisterTea 5y ago
  Modern "programmers" don't know how computer work. Film at 11.
- jlokier 5y ago
  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.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

70 points by ackatz 5y ago

tvanderb 5y ago

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

digitalsushi 5y ago
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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

petard 5y ago

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.

frank_sausage 5y ago
It enables running Linux ARM based VMs on macOS.

protomyth 5y ago

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-silicon-progress-update.html https://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2021/04/fusion-on-apple-...

ecf 5y ago
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_workstation_development_team_fired/ https://www.theregister.com/2016/01/27/vmware_fusion_and_wor...
- eddieroger 5y ago
  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.
  - ecf 5y ago
    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.

656565656565 5y ago

What is Fusion providing that Parallels doesn’t already?

frank_sausage 5y ago
Better UI, no scammy "buy our other product" buttons in the app UI, no misleading pricing. I always found Parallels to be quite shady.
- nottorp 5y ago
  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.
  - sys_64738 5y ago
    Fusion is free for personal use.
    - nottorp 5y ago
      That's a recent thing. Last time i needed to renew it was paid.
72deluxe 5y ago
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.
kattkunskap 5y ago
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...

nottorp 5y ago

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.

nicoburns 5y ago
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.
- nottorp 5y ago
  > 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.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    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.
- testfoobar 5y ago
  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.
tonyedgecombe 5y ago
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.

CSDude 5y ago

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.

mettamage 5y ago
I run Visual Studio on it with an old version of ASP.NET It works totally fine
johnwalkr 5y ago
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.

easton 5y ago

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?

sithadmin 5y ago
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.
wila 5y ago
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.

404mm 5y ago

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 “.

sithadmin 5y ago
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.

ubermonkey 5y ago

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 ...

salamandersauce 5y ago
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.
- ubermonkey 5y ago
  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.
MisterTea 5y ago
Modern "programmers" don't know how computer work. Film at 11.
jlokier 5y ago
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.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]