The good news is you will be able to locally run near perfect copies of hosted virtual arm servers. That's actually a good thing and it means I don't need to keep using a raspberry pi as a dev box.
How many Windows servers are arm though currently?
The good news is you will be able to locally run near perfect copies of hosted virtual arm servers. That's actually a good thing and it means I don't need to keep using a raspberry pi as a dev box.
If supported...Agree. VMs would only make sense if you want to run Windows on Mac. But containers for everything else. With M1, Crossover (WINE) may be the only legal way to run Windows applications.
There are apps that don't run. Not many though. IMEEvery X86 Windows application runs in Windows for ARM
I think MS wants to capture this “Win-on-Mac” market along with “Win-on-iPad” types of market without sharing profit with Parallels or VMware, which is actually a direct competitor of MS Azure Cloud service. They technology route they likely wish to approach, but not yet fully ready at the moment, is Windows desktop experience streaming, i.e, Windows-as-a-Service or WaaS. Conveniently, this can also evade Apple’s cut of the pie, and is resilient towards future technology iterations.Agree. VMs would only make sense if you want to run Windows on Mac. But containers for everything else. With M1, Crossover (WINE) may be the only legal way to run Windows applications.
Vmware really dragged their feet on this one, and they seem to be on their high horse when it comes to not supporting windows 10. parallels already supports m1 macs with official support for windows. Yes i understand windows does not officially support m1 and vmware is getting behind that stance but still kinda seems like vmware just doesnt care anymore on that aspect on their software.
I like to think of myself as pretty tech savvy but I don’t even begin to know how I would do this!Use Remote Desktop to a datacenter with windows server instead.
I think the most dumbfounding thing I read was that VMWare doesn't officially support ESXi on the current generation of Mac Pros. At least those can be kitted up with 1.5TB of RAM (still a far cry from the 24+TB of RAM my contemporaries are running in servers these days) and can, in theory, run macOS without violating Apple's EULA. Albeit, I last administered such deployments circa 2015 when I was a Senior System Administrator for Sauce Labs. At the time, the biggest pain was that the vintage Mac Pros we were using, could not be rack mounted. The present 2019 revision of Mac Pros do have a rack mount kit, but if VMWare hasn't even been offering ESXi on those? What a waste. A complete failure to grasp their dwindling user base.
You don’t have to use subscription. You can buy it outright. I’ve been doing virtualization in the Mac for over 10 years. Parallels was there first, and VMware never caught up. I use VMware ESXi for work, so I understand what VMware does. Mac is an afterthought. They don’t even give it as much attention as they do to the virtualization on Linux desktop, and virtualization on any desktop (including Windows) is already an afterthought for VMWare. That’s not where most of their revenue comes from, not even by a long shot. The current version of VMware Fusion that runs on the x86 architecture is completely free. They can’t compete with Parallels, so they give it away for free just to hurt Parallels.
For Parallels, Mac virtualization is their prime revenue source.
VMware should spend their Mac development resources for making their administration utilities for ESXi run on the Mac instead of blowing their resources on the sub-par product that no one needs anymore because most people need virtualization on the Mac to run Windows. VMware lost virtualization on desktop on Mac to Parallels. Sometimes it takes courage to admit defeat and go do something else.
They already laid off their Mac developers once - about 5 years ago or so. Then, they re-hired them and tried to chase Parallels again. This time around, it’s time to kill Fusion.
Look at a Apache Guacamole in a docker container for Remote Desktop ... also Mesh Connect seems quite well regarded.Is the ability to connect to a Vsphere server still intact? If so, I might just fire up my vsphere server throw Windows 10/11 on it and connect that way. I know it won’t work remotely but there are ways around that like Jump Desktop.
AI like to think of myself as pretty tech savvy but I don’t even begin to know how I would do this!
Web utilities run on the Mac. That’s profound. Was it worth typing it up? Did vSphere Client ever work on macOS without running a Windows VM?The Pro version of Parallels is only yearly subscription, you can't purchase outright.
ESXi admin utilities DO run on Mac...... ESXi Web Interface, vSphere Web Interface, Fusion to connect to ESXi/vSphere, PowerCLI via Powershell on Mac......
I guess I can understand that as VMWare's justification, but it still seems to me, as if they completely failed to read their potential market demographic. Writing as a seasoned sysadmin, with decades of career history, as well as someone who has deployed hypervisors at scale for various employers, including ESXi: system administrators aren't "DevOps" we consider the "Dev" redundant, and if you couldn't develop code, you have no business being in ops. As an ops person, I have had badge access to more datacenters than are worth enumerating here, and datacenters: use rackmount hardware. A mac mini, does not ship in a rack mount configuration.the T2 chip in the Mac Pro 2019 doesn't make running ESXi seamless. The Mini 2018 (with T2) is supported but it also sells in much larger numbers also. Low volume and somewhat pain in the but T2 .... and a "dead end" platform probably not best use of their time. [ If Apple does a 2021 Intel refresh of the Mac Pro then the 2019 model would now be on Apple's vintage countdown clock. ]
I'm not really sure what you mean by "cut off booting" on the M-series Apple Silicon, given that others have gotten Linux and OpenBSD booting on such hardware. Albeit, ESXi was purportedly "not Linux" and VMWare's "proprietary hypervisor OS" but given that ESXi was also exclusively intended for x86/AMD64 virtualization, I am not surprised to not see ESXi running on an M1 Mac Mini. I am much more surprised to see VMWare did not go through the efforts to attempt to get ESXi certified on Mac Pro 7,1 2019 revisions (which is VMWare's certification process BTW, not Apple's, having previously helped at least one company attain VMWare certification) since it can be configured in 28 core 1.5TB iterations, which seem suitable for virtualized macOS deployments.Additionally, Apple has pragmatically cut off booting on the M-series systems so that is a dead end for ESXi as a Type 1 hypervisor there. There is a bit of decoupling of priorities there between the two companies. Throw on top that Apple is getting rid of kernel extensions and VMWare has to rewrite the foundations for Fusion ( and perhaps limit ESXi to only running on top of their Fusion layered on top of Apple's Virtualization framework/library). That whole foundation re-write is probably costs much more than a Mac Pro certification would cost ..... but probably going to see some "clawbacks" on cost cutting associated with the Mac products where VMWare can do it with minimal impact.
Basically a Type 1 Hypervisor work is swimming up stream from where Apple is applying vast majority of their Mac R&D budget. Type 2 is all Apple is opening the door for over the long term on macOS. If Apple did a stripped down version of macOS instance that primarily just provisioned the their hypervisor framework that actually might work decently well on their hardware. Not quite as 'thin' as a type 1 but probably not horribly bad either.
Use a PaaS or IaaS service provider to set up a personal or team server. How big depends on your load requirement. It can be a shabby $5 a month VPS by Linode, et al., or a bare-metal dedicated server, which OVH gives a good value proposition. You don't need anything more than that.I like to think of myself as pretty tech savvy but I don’t even begin to know how I would do this!
Apparently I didn't.Buy hardware for your use case. Seems you didn’t?
Use a PaaS or IaaS service provider to set up a personal or team server. How big depends on your load requirement. It can be a shabby $5 a month VPS by Linode, et al., or a bare-metal dedicated server, which OVH gives a good value proposition. You don't need anything more than that.
TBH, I think if it’s just for your personal use, it’s not worth the effort. Just get a secondary PC for what you need Windows for and save all the potential technical obstacles. It’s not gonna be cheap to do it on a server as hosting is not exactly cheap and you need a Windows license for the server instance you set up.As a aging GenX'er and not an IT-Pro, I can't say that I really understand this 😬. But it does seem interesting other than the challenge of getting licenses, doing installs and security etc.. I
I'll look into it though. Thanks!
NoA
Web utilities run on the Mac. That’s profound. Was it worth typing it up? Did vSphere Client ever work on macOS without running a Windows VM?
You don’t have to use subscription. You can buy it outright. I’ve been doing virtualization in the Mac for over 10 years. Parallels was there first, and VMware never caught up. I use VMware ESXi for work, so I understand what VMware does. Mac is an afterthought. They don’t even give it as much attention as they do to the virtualization on Linux desktop, and virtualization on any desktop (including Windows) is already an afterthought for VMWare. That’s not where most of their revenue comes from, not even by a long shot. The current version of VMware Fusion that runs on the x86 architecture is completely free. They can’t compete with Parallels, so they give it away for free just to hurt Parallels.
For Parallels, Mac virtualization is their prime revenue source.
VMware should spend their Mac development resources for making their administration utilities for ESXi run on the Mac instead of blowing their resources on the sub-par product that no one needs anymore because most people need virtualization on the Mac to run Windows. VMware lost virtualization on desktop on Mac to Parallels. Sometimes it takes courage to admit defeat and go do something else.
They already laid off their Mac developers once - about 5 years ago or so. Then, they re-hired them and tried to chase Parallels again. This time around, it’s time to kill Fusion.
Move way from x86 chip architecture by Apple.Is there a reason for why neither VMware nor Parallels are emulating Windows for Intel?
Which puts me right back where we started...TBH, I think if it’s just for your personal use, it’s not worth the effort. Just get a secondary PC for what you need Windows for and save all the potential technical obstacles. It’s not gonna be cheap to do it on a server as hosting is not exactly cheap and you need a Windows license for the server instance you set up.
Why didn’t you list those features that distinguish Fusion Player from Fusuon Pro? Because 99% of people who virtualize on MacOS don’t even know what those features mean or do.That’s a gross misrepresentation of the truth that seems to do nothing more than try to rationalize an apparent lack of product knowledge regarding VMware Fusion and/or a significant degree of affection for Parallels.
There are three licenses for Fusion:
1. Fusion Player - Free for personal use.
2. Fusion Player - Paid license for commercial use.
3. Fusion Pro - Paid license that adds 6 additional features.