VMware Fusion for Apple Silicon Public Tech Preview Now Available • Hacker News Board

Re: VMware Fusion for Apple Silicon Public Tech Preview Now Available

#31

Post by Mindwipe » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 12:54 PM UTC

shawnz wrote: post #16

donatj wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Re: VMware Fusion for Apple Silicon Public Tech Preview Now Available

#32

Post by sithadmin » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 12:55 PM UTC

shawnz wrote: post #16

donatj wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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)

Re: VMware Fusion for Apple Silicon Public Tech Preview Now Available

#33

Post by easton » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 1:02 PM UTC

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?

Re: VMware Fusion for Apple Silicon Public Tech Preview Now Available

#34

Post by 404mm » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 1:05 PM UTC

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 “.

Re: VMware Fusion for Apple Silicon Public Tech Preview Now Available

#35

Post by vegai_ » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 1:06 PM UTC

mirekrusin wrote: post #10

protomyth wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (n…

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.

Re: VMware Fusion for Apple Silicon Public Tech Preview Now Available

#36

Post by sithadmin » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 1:07 PM UTC

ecf wrote: post #22

protomyth wrote: post #4

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 be…

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.

Re: VMware Fusion for Apple Silicon Public Tech Preview Now Available

#37

Post by sithadmin » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 1:09 PM UTC

easton wrote: post #33

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.

Re: VMware Fusion for Apple Silicon Public Tech Preview Now Available

#38

Post by ubermonkey » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 1:14 PM UTC

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 ...

Re: VMware Fusion for Apple Silicon Public Tech Preview Now Available

#39

Post by nicoburns » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

nottorp wrote: post #29

nicoburns wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: VMware Fusion for Apple Silicon Public Tech Preview Now Available

#40

Post by _ph_ » Mon, Oct 04, 2021, 1:28 PM UTC

656565656565 wrote: post #6

What is Fusion providing that Parallels doesn’t already?

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.