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VMware Fusion for Apple Silicon Public Tech Preview Now Available

blogs.vmware.com

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

#41

Post by wila »

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?

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.

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

#42

Post by IncRnd »

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…

> 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.

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

#43

Post by rudian »

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…

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.

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

#44

Post by michelb »

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.

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.

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

#45

Post by COM2323 »

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…

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.

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

#46

Post by ecf »

eddieroger wrote: post #28
ecf wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#47

Post by ecommerceguy »

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.

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

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

#48

Post by sithadmin »

ecf wrote: post #46
eddieroger wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#49

Post by sithadmin »

404mm wrote: post #34

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. Real…

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.

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

#50

Post by [deleted] »

IncRnd wrote: post #42
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…

> 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.

[deleted]
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