VMWare Fusion announces macOS Big Sur-compatible tech preview

VMWare Fusion has announced that a "tech preview" of its virtualization app with support for macOS Big Sur is coming in early July.

Among other features, macOS Big Sur lays the groundwork for an upcoming Mac shift to proprietary Apple Silicon.

Aside from announcing the tech preview, VMWare didn't offer any other details about how its own virtualization software will support macOS Big Sur — or how it'll be supported by ARM-based chips. In a subsequent tweets, VMWare Fusion asked its followers how they'd use Fusion on ARM.

Share with us your big dreams... how would you use Fusion on ARM? https://t.co/GrtNmpJiC3
— VMware Fusion (@VMwareFusion) June 23, 2020

Current virtualization software won't work without support on ARM-based platforms, though Apple has said that macOS Big Sur introduces "virtualization technology" that will allow users to run Linux on machines with Apple Silicon.

During its WWDC 2020 keynote, Apple showed off a Mac with an ARM A12Z Bionic chipset running a Linux distribution in Parallels, suggesting that the company is working to support virtualization software through the transition.

Other Intel-based apps will continue to run on ARM Macs with the help of Apple's Rosetta 2 technology. The shift to ARM chips will also allow future Macs to run iPad and iOS apps natively.

13 Comments

blastdoor 3565 comments · 15 Years

About 4 years ago

The question:

"How would you use Fusion on ARM?"

kind of makes me wonder if they are trying to figure out if it makes sense to support Apple Silicon.

This also makes me think that there is no clear plan/intent to have Windows running on Apple Silicon.

No biggie for me -- I'm only interested in Mac and Linux. But I can appreciate this would be a deal breaker for some users.

anome 1545 comments · 16 Years

I'm watching all this in self-interest. I've just recently gotten back into running Windows games in Parallels (yes, I know). Previously I was using both Windows Server and Linux VMs as a test bed for work related stuff.

Would I be really upset if Windows support was dropped completely? Not sure. I don't really want to buy a machine just for gaming - I can barely justify the number of machines I have currently. So I'm kind of curious as to what happens with Fusion and Parallels with regards Windows Virtualisation. I'm old enough to remember Soft Windows running on a PowerMac 6100/60. Not the greatest experience, but with surprising performance for total x86 emulation. (At the time I was working with actual Windows machines that made it look positively speedy.)

Can the Apple Silicon succeed where PPC nearly did 25 years ago? Seems plausible, but doubtful.

maltz 499 comments · 13 Years

anome said:

I'm old enough to remember Soft Windows running on a PowerMac 6100/60. Not the greatest experience, but with surprising performance for total x86 emulation. (At the time I was working with actual Windows machines that made it look positively speedy.)

Can the Apple Silicon succeed where PPC nearly did 25 years ago? Seems plausible, but doubtful.

The PowerMac 6100 had an optional DOS compatibility card that had a bonafide 486 system-on-a-card. Are you sure that's not what you were using that had passable performance? Because none of the purely software solutions I ever tried were really usable for anything than just to play with.

That said, the CPU is a lot smaller part of a machine's overall performance today than it was 20-25 years ago. But mostly, I would be very surprised if Windows-on-Mac is soon to be a thing of the past, especially when Rosetta 2 is inevitably retired, other than maybe running the ARM version of Windows - which is really beside the point.

mjtomlin 2690 comments · 20 Years

anome said:
Can the Apple Silicon succeed where PPC nearly did 25 years ago? Seems plausible, but doubtful.

Modern CPUs have multiple cores and they are extremely fast. There's no reason a PC emulation app today would be as dreadful as they were back then.

sflocal 6133 comments · 16 Years

I run Windows on all my Macs using VMWare. Unfortunately, some of my development tools (IBM) are Windows-only and it's not going to change. I hope there is a path for VMWare to run Windows x86(64) on ARM. It's only used for business apps so it's not necessarily needed to be a max-performance setup.

I watched the keynote and I got the impression that while MacOS will run x86 for the next few years, I feel it's going to take the back-burner as time goes on to focus more on MacOS(ARM) edition.

I was planning to buy an iMac this year to replace my 2015 iMac. I still might, but I think I'm going to wait to see what the ARM Macs will do. It's pretty exciting and I understand and support Apple's reasons for doing so. Intel screwed up (as usual), and I don't believe Apple will ever go with AMD, although that would be nice.

I think Apple's CPU offerings are superior to what Intel has been offering. I'm excited to see how far Apple will take this approach. High performance, with low heat will make for some exciting iMac designs. I just hope they still include user-upgradeable RAM and hopefully not turn it into a giant iPad on a stand with everything sealed.