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my question is, if it can run linux on arm why not windows?

Because Microsoft does not license Windows 10 for ARM except for OEM use in devices such as the Surface Pro X. As you know, Windows 10 for ARM is not the same as Windows 10 on X86, there are some fairly serious limitations right now in what you can and can't run on it. But until they allow you to purchase a non-OEM copy, you're out of luck.
 
True but I am running Microsoft Flight simulator 2020 and soon Star Wars squadrons with a hook up to Oculus Quest VR glasses, so I need a lot more power. I am selling my last year Oculus Quest VR glasses and getting the Oculus Quest 2 glass which are coming soon it looks like they will have 4k and 120hz refresh which should make this games super fast.
I use a MacBook Pro 16 32gb of ram and 2TB SSD of storage with a Razer X EGPU and a AMD Radeon Vega 64 gaming card.

Nice :cool: Wouldn't you rather have a Nvidia RTX 30 Series and a gaming PC for such demanding use or is your Bootcamp eGPU setup fast enough for 4K? Only two days til RTX 30 series available.

Back to VMware Fusion 12. Just imported my Fusion 10 VM. Windows needed to reactivate - but they've made it much less hassle. In settings - activation let Windows diagnose activation and select you've changed your hardware. It re-activated without having to call Windows support. I thought the free version might be some horribly crippled version of Fusion but it seems to have all the bells and whistles of the previous non-pro version. Christmas early this year :)
 
can someone explain to me why the paid VMs are so much better than VBox?

I've been running VBox for years and it's fine. Why should I pay?
You've never needed to deploy an OVF file (& probably don't even know what they are). Vbox doesn't manage my ESXi hosts: creating/starting/stopping/deteting VMs, connecting to the consoles, uploading/downloading VMs, Connecting a VM's DVD drive to an Iso on my Mac, etc. Nor is VBox a supported environment for most of the VMs I need to run: F5, Checkpoint, Fortinet, etc. VBox is a toy. Fusion is a tool used for work.
 
my question is, if it can run linux on arm why not windows?
Ah - sorry, misunderstood. It "should" be able to run Windows Arm but as you might have seen from other responses in the thread, Windows Arm is not as mature as x86, there aren't a lot of Windows Arm programs besides Office, etc. It might require a compile or some tweaks to run on AS - probably won't straight out of the box early on (based on what I've been able to read/understand).
 
Bottom left of the webpage 'Fusion 12 Player'. Register for a free personal use license. The license key you receive is perpetual, not trial. Not for 30 days. I have it up and running.

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FYI,
The link you mentioned is taking me to a page to download Horizon:
 

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Yep. I was logged into my account when I opened that link. Still went to the Horizon page.

Continue reading the thread beyond those posts and it should clarify things for you. A different link was posted that takes you to the correct website.
 
For users with systems still on macOS Mojave, a Fusion 12 license key will be valid to activate Fusion 11.5.6 on those machines.

I use Fusion Pro 11 at work - great bit of software and integrates with vSphere nicely. Thought I'd use this to bring my home machine up to Fusion 11 standard, however the Fusion 12 license key for Player/free does not activate 11.5.6 at all. I guess a paid key does. You cannot use downgrade rights either as the free "perpetual trial" key doesn't appear in the licensing portal. :mad:
 
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You cannot use downgrade rights either as the free "perpetual trial" key doesn't appear in the licensing portal either. :mad:

Yeah I hope they fix this. When you register for a free license you should get an email with a link that takes you to your license key.
 
So if I’m going to be moving from Parallels to Fusion, would it over all be better and cleaner to make a new, clean Windows XP VM, or just convert my existing one?

so looking forward to not having to pay $100 a year updating two licenses for two Macs just to keep my VM’s working properly on the newest macOS release...
If you can, you'd probably be better off with a new VM. Years back I migrated a Parallels Win7 VM to Fusion and had a poor experience for a while. When I installed a clean Windows under Fusion all my issues dissapeared. I blame Parrallel drivers that didn't uninstall cleanly.
 
If you can, you'd probably be better off with a new VM. Years back I migrated a Parallels Win7 VM to Fusion and had a poor experience for a while. When I installed a clean Windows under Fusion all my issues dissapeared. I blame Parrallel drivers that didn't uninstall cleanly.

Will do! A fresh install will be easy enough. Thanks :)
 
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I'm the product manager

Great to see the product manager is following this thread! Thank you. Hope you'll respond to more questions. I've been a Fusion user for more than ten years. It's been a bit expensive for personal use, but I had Windows-only apps I wanted to run, and I've been pretty happy .There is no feature missing in Player that I have ever cared about, even the couple of times where I've needed Windows for a consulting project. So I'm glad to see the Free player license for people like me (and, yeah, I'll pay if I end up using it for work).

But ... it looks like Fusion 12 Player (whether you pay for the commercial license or not) comes with zero support. You can't even access the forums? Is this true? If this is the case, I'm likely to stick with 11.5.
 
I was curious, can VMware Fusion Pro, and player coexist ? I was thinking about comparing the two side by side, even though I've settled on Pro as my official copy.
It's the same actual application, distinguished only by the license. I doubt you can have the 2 on one computer.
 
It's the same actual application, distinguished only by the license. I doubt you can have the 2 on one computer.
Ok, wasn't sure. I remember VMware used to have an app named VMWare Player, wasn't sure if the player portion was the same for the mac.. Sounds like it's all done in licensing these days with one app bundle.
 
my question is, if it can run linux on arm why not windows?

The ARM version of Windows is not really Windows, it shouldn't even be called that. When people say they need Windows, they mean the x64 version of Windows, not the ARM version, which is completely gimped and doesn't run any of the modern high performance applications. Only the .NET applications would run correctly on ARM, and some very basic 32-bit apps. Forget about any professional software on the ARM version of Windows.
 
Source: I'm the product manager

Hey Mike, can I run a 32-bit macOS like Mojave or earlier using VMware Fusion? For clarification, I would be installing Fusion on a Mac running Catalina. I'm looking for a solution to run 32-bit apps after I upgrade to Catalina. I'm searching everywhere for answer, so thanks in advance!
 
The ARM version of Windows is not really Windows, it shouldn't even be called that. When people say they need Windows, they mean the x64 version of Windows, not the ARM version, which is completely gimped and doesn't run any of the modern high performance applications. Only the .NET applications would run correctly on ARM, and some very basic 32-bit apps. Forget about any professional software on the ARM version of Windows.

i see

i wasn’t aware full windows didn’t run on arm
 
Hey Mike, can I run a 32-bit macOS like Mojave or earlier using VMware Fusion? For clarification, I would be installing Fusion on a Mac running Catalina. I'm looking for a solution to run 32-bit apps after I upgrade to Catalina. I'm searching everywhere for answer, so thanks in advance!
I'm not Mike, but yes, this works completely fine.
 
vmware fusion could do a better job at assigning static IP's ... and auto-close VM windows upon OS GUEST shutdown ... but, the CPU and MAMORY limitations in parallels makes it worth the switch

I agree with PAR->VMF migration ... its not a clean as id like to see it

not happy however with the upgrade costs ($99 vs. P's $49)
 
No. I'll admit I exaggerated by saying it'll only run MS Office but Windows on ARM is still very much limited. While it has made good strides in emulating the older 32 bit x86 ISA, x86-64, the standard for high performance apps for the past 15 years is still not supported and from what I understand performance even for 32 bit apps is nowhere near Rosetta 2 on MacOS. Even if we assume X86-64 support comes in 2021, the performance of virtualized Windows ARM emulating

These are all software issues that Microsoft is working on. They're not forever issues. You can bet they'll be catching up to Rosetta 2 on performance. And they're already said x86-64 will be arriving very soon. But x86-64 was also not widely adopted on Windows.

Don't assume Microsoft is just going to sit on their hands and never improve Windows on ARM. Especially as ARM takes off and Nvidia starts making ARM PCs.
 
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This is an Intel (x86) release. They haven’t released anything for ARM.

There’s very significant issues for VMWare and Parallels once Apple moved to ARM.They won’t be able to do virtualisation as they do today. Either they will need to do emulation of x86 or they’ll need to pivot to something like a cloud hosted service and have that Windows compute happen via a remote OS instance. I honestly suspect cloud hosted OS and streaming for services like gaming will be where things go.

They will do virtualisation and container support but it will be ARM on ARM - not x86 on ARM.

Virtualisation isn't just to run x86 windows software; it is useful for ARM as well for application/OS development, web development (run linux web server, etc. as demonstrated in WWDC20, etc.).

Just because it won't run x86 doesn't make a huge amount of difference to a lot of people. I know I'll still have use for VMware or some other VM package on an ARM Mac with no x86 support.
 
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