Parallels / Fusion on MB Air M3

[Biko65]

Just pulled the trigger on M3 MBA 1TB 24GB Ram...I have quite an experience running VmWare on Windows systems but almost never used Parallels or recent version of Fusion.
Anyone can share his experience running virtual machines on such software/hardware combination ?

Thanks

 

[ipaqrat]

It will not be like running the VMs on a "wintel" machine. The only OS you can virtualize will be ARM (Windows ARM or a Linux ARM), and it's early days for those distros. Driver emulation is dodgy. ARM versions of some apps are simply not ready for prime time (AutoCad/3DSMax and Adobe Acrobat) and even MS Office will try your patience. There will be lots of tinkering.

 

[Biko65]

It will not be like running the VMs on a "wintel" machine.

Yeah thank you, I get that, the ARM version of Windows might not be optimized....what about other virtual session of MacOS under Fusion or Parallel...? In you opinion, given an initial 24GB amount of physical RAM, will I be able to run a couple of 6GB virtual sessions ?

 

[ipaqrat]

Sry, misunderstood the ask... yeah, I think you can get away smaller slices of RAM out of 24 GB, still leaving enough for the host to run. I found the M's cope with VMs as well or better than my older intel Core laptops.

Industrial Unix, itself, has always been virtualization friendly - sorta like Hyper-V after Microsoft bought finally up enough intellectual property. MacOS does have a hypervisor capability built in - you feed it an IPSW and a bootable restore image DMG. It's slog through the configurations, though; kinda frustrating for me, as I'm terrible with keyboards.

As expected, vmWare, Parallels and VirtualBox have nicer VM management tools, but no performance advantage over the MacOS built in hypervisor when virtualizing MacOS itself.

 

[erichui84]

I’ve got the new MacBook Air m3 with 16gb ram and also a M2 Max studio with 64fb ram both running fine with VMware.

I am mostly just using it for a simple windows application written in .net 4 and (I’ve developed it myself) and also Visual Studio, and it seems to run fine.

I used to run it with my old MacBook Pro 2016 with 16gb ram and windows 7, and both the M2 Max and m3 runs much quicker than my older MacBook Pro 2016 with i5 dual core.

However since I’ve only got 16gb ram with my m3 mba I have to allocate less memory to it than my Mac Studio (I think 4gb or 6gb, cannot remember as I don’t have it with me now). It runs ok with no noticeable slowdown however 8gb was pushing it as I think 8gb wasn’t enough for Mac OS on its own.

With 24gb I think you will be fine.

What do you do with your VM usually?

 

[TSE]

I run ARM Windows 11 Parallels desktop on my M2 MacBook Air with 16 GBs of RAM and am super happy with the performance. I multitask within it and do 3d gaming.

Parallels desktop comes with a free trial. Give it a go.