<i>We don’t plan to support installing or running x86 VMs on Macs with Apple silicon.</i><p><i>What about x86 emulation?</i><p><i>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?</i><p><i>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.</i><p><i>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><p><a href="https://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2021/04/fusion-on-apple-silicon-progress-update.html" rel="nofollow">https://blogs.vmware.com/teamfusion/2021/04/fusion-on-apple-...</a>
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.<p>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 ...
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.
I wonder if Apple realizes where this is going for developers that don't only do web stuff.<p>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.<p>Are they trying to push Linux/x86 adoption? :)<p>Edit: at least they were honest enough to announce the transition early. I would have bought a new Mac Pro last year otherwise.
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).<p>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?
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.<p>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 “.
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.