VMware announces tech preview of Arm hypervisor – Fusion on Apple's M1 silicon

VMware has kind-of announced a hypervisor for Arm processors, or at least one of them: Apple's M1 system-on-a-chip. Michael Roy, who oversees VMware's Fusion and Workstation desktop hypervisors, took to Twitter with the news that Fusion for M1 is now in a closed tech preview. Hey friends! Are you interested in joining our …

[tip pc]

Interesting

Just need the rumoured new Mac mini’s and this could be of interest.

Dependent on if OS X will report me for running virtualised software.

[gnasher729]

Re: Interesting

Apple is fine with running virtualised software - but check the MacOS license terms if you are allowed to run more than one copy of MacOS. Last time I looked you were allowed to use one copy of MacOS, on an Apple computer. Another copy in a virtual machine would be two. Running Linux or Windows is none of their business.

[katrinab]

Re: Interesting

You are allowed to run MacOS virtual machines, but only if hosted on Apple hardware.

I would gently suggest you don't though, unless you want to run a really old version of MacOS for some reason, and then you would probably not be using VMWare to run them but rather QEMU or one of the PPC/Motorola emulators.

[DS999]

Doesn't sound very useful

Won't support running Windows or Mac VMs, so unless you want to run Linux VMs this is pretty useless.

Parallels supports all three (though unless something has changed recently Microsoft won't let you activate Windows/ARM in a VM so it is only useful for testing)

[Anonymous Coward]

Blame Microsoft

Microsoft doesn't support Windows on ARM under their licensing..... so Parallels isn't strictly legal.

[katrinab]

Re: Blame Microsoft

I think that might change with Windows 11. Possibly it would be an extra-cost addon you buy from Parallels.

[DS999]

Re: Blame Microsoft

There's nothing wrong with installing Windows/ARM on a VM, Microsoft just won't allow you to activate it. So it is of limited usefulness - you can use it for testing, but obviously for real work having to wipe and reinstall every month (or however long before non activated copies quit working) is a no go.

Why Microsoft doesn't want to sell Windows/ARM licenses is a mystery to me. I guess they still hope they can someday sell Microsoft branded ARM hardware people actually want to buy, and allowing people to run it on other platforms reduces that potential market they dream of. Seems pretty short sighted, and might end up leading to them killing Windows/ARM if they don't change course, IMHO.

As stated in the comment above, maybe they will allow it with Windows 11. Likely too they'll tell owners of any official Windows 10 ARM hardware to upgrade to Windows 11 if they want continued support, and any Windows 10 ARM hardware that can't support Windows 11 will be out of luck. Just like how they left a lot of owners of Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 8 in the lurch by simply dropping support for hardware that didn't meet the upgrade criteria.