VMWare Fusion announces macOS Big Sur-compatible tech preview
Mike PetersonCredit: VMWare
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.
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13 Comments
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.
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.
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.