I worked many many years with Fusion on Intel Mac and ran into the same issue since last year, when I bought the new 16' M1 macbook pro. If you need a Linux VM that's very much possible on Apple Silicon, and it works well using the VMware Fusion Tech Preview. An Intel Mac (VMware Fusion) or a PC with Windows or Linux (VMware Workstation). If you need a Windows VM you need to run a suitable version of VMware on an x86 platform, meaning Intel or AMD processor.

open-vm-tools is available through most package managers in these Linux distributions and is usually installed by default when installing a Linux OS in a VM. Linux has been supporting ARM for several years, so ARM support in modern Linux distributions is very good. What you can do is run Linux VMs, such as Ubuntu and Fedora, that are available for ARM.

If Microsoft were to make a suitable license available I'm sure the VMware Fusion guys will support it eventually, but for now there are no VMware Tools available for Windows on ARM, and any methods to install it anyways are unsupported and most likely won't work well if at all. There are some ways to do it, but they don't work well and since there is no way to get a license VMware does not make any effort to support Windows on ARM. Are you saying that the preview version should work if and only if I use VMWare tools? If so, where can I get the explain-it-like-I'm-5 version of how to install VMWare tools, including which version to use (Mac, Windows?) and how I make the disk image available to VMWare Fusion in the right way?īasically, as things are right now you can not run Windows in VMware on Apple Silicon. I downloaded the preview version for free to run on my new MacBook Pro, which uses an M1 chip. I am a web developer but I am very new to running virtual machines, so you might need to explain things to me slowly, with all the jargon defined. But note that it's unsupported, and without VMWare tools has significant limitations.

Some folks have gotten it to work (see other threads here in the forum for tips). > Due to microsoft licensing restrictions there is currently no support for running Windows ARM on an M1 machine. There is NO way to run Intel guests on an M1 machine (period, full stop - if you need Intel guests, run an intel machine). The preview version will run ARM guests only. There is a preview version (that's the forum you actually posted the question in).

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