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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?
 
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.
If supported...


Windows in a virtual machine may have overhead, but its allot more compatible.... Wine/Porting Kit its still and always will be, 2nd best due to the way it will never be directx 12 for now....

The only good thing going for is is peformance, and depends on the engine used,, (which is still on ya own), because not everyone stays up to date with up-to-date screenshots/articles online. Its more of a DIY issue. Some like that, others don't.
 
Well while i love the powerpc times, even my last powerpc powerbook was fsster than the first intel macbook in booting, i use also many windows apps npt existent on mac. not even similar. anyway a hard future choice, but i think i will switch to surfacebook pro 16 inches...
 
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.
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.
 
The days of on-local-machine desktop virtualisation are nearly over.There's way more (recurring) revenue to be earned by M$ and others with their cloud desktops.
 
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.


VMWare isn't dragging their feet here as much as they have far more work to do.
VMWare on Intel depends very heavily upon kernel extensions. The product uses common code base features with ESXi and the other enterprise virtualization tools they have (and also the Windows Workstation product). That is a dual edge sword problem on the macOS M-series.

Apple has pragmatically banned using the lower level approaches to doing virtualization and vendors have to now layer their product on top of the Apple Virtualization framework library. That library hasn't be as robust as VMWare's solution. So VMWare has to port Fusion to a new foundation and not loose the major features that provide high symbiosis and synergy with other VMWare products.

At this point the casual version of Fusion is free (no cost). One of the purposes of that product is as a gateway to the rest of the product catalog. If it gets disconnected in a major way then it kind of loses that purpose.


Parallels moved a bit faster here because they don't have a billion dollar other product line. Their previous version had an optional mode to use an earlier iteration of the Apple Virtualization framework. I imagine Apple may have had a meeting with VMWare a while back and "strongly suggested" that VMWare look into moving to the Apple framework. VMWare probably punted.

A early VMWare blog suggested that they found "problems" in the Virtualization coverage that needed to be fixed in the upcoming macOS. Wouldn't be shocking if VMWare had a macOS 12 only solution. (timing wise and probably Apple additions needed. ). And on top of that the market for the major product is shifting a bit ( more containers are impacting number of virtual machines. ) so VMWare as a whole had/has bigger pain points. A major re-investment in product because Apple is making them throw out stuff that already works probably wasn't grabbing major funding from the C-level execs earlier.

VMWare other products may have deeper relationships with Microsoft ( need to run on Azure cloud instances or interface with them ). That can lead to being more sensitive to pushing negative feedback to Microsoft about how folks can run Windows on Macs for free and out of compliance. And vice vera (not encouraging Microsoft to promote hacking around VMWare licensing. ) . Parallels partnered with Google to bring Windows to Chrome. That probably isn't putting them at the top of Microsoft's Christmas list . (not all bad for Microsoft but also probably taking away Windows PC sales. )


Both products are going to end up mainly sitting on top of the same tech. So performance wise there are likely to be smaller differences. Lots of competitive differences is going to boil down to the tech laid done on top. First may not necessarily be better over a term of multiple years.
 
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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.

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. ]


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.
 
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.

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......
 
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.
Look at a Apache Guacamole in a docker container for Remote Desktop ... also Mesh Connect seems quite well regarded.
 
I like to think of myself as pretty tech savvy but I don’t even begin to know how I would do this!
A
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......
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 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 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 2019 Mac Pro revision, does have a rack mount kit. Albeit, it is not cheap, Apple hardware seems to command a premium price. Nonetheless, ESXi is not VMWare Fusion. ESXi is aimed, *precisely* at system administrators as users, not desktop and laptop users as Fusion is. To me, VMWare validating a Mac Mini, while failing to validate a Mac Pro for use with ESXi, screams that someone at VMWare didn't want to approve a Mac Pro requisition line item, and completely failed to understand who their customer base was. As previously written, while working as a Senior System Administrator for Sauce Labs, we ran ESXi on Mac Pros, but the earlier revisions, which were not rack mounted. I have pictures of data centers, and wasted racks, with Mac Pros lingering at the bottom, because we needed them to run virtualized OS X/macOS instances to stay within EULA compliance with Apple, but what a nightmare.

I am aware that there are aftermarket Mac Mini rack mount kits, but from everything I have seen, they're atrocious after thoughts. Meanwhile, to me, it seems as if VMWare provided little or no thought to how ESXi is used in practice, at least with regards to Apple hardware.

Sure, it is possible to run OS X/macOS in other hypervisors, and even on non-Apple hardware, but businesses typically do their due diligence to not run afoul of other businesses and their EULAs. Not all of us can be like Corellium and tempt $50 billion lawsuits, I am still astounded that court case went the way it did, but given that Apple has appealed (as of August 17th, 2021) that decision, if I were at Corellium, I would not be sleeping peacefully. As it is, I have lost more or less all professional respect for Corellium in the process, even if their efforts were instrumental in getting Linux running on Apple Silicon/M1 which has since led to OpenBSD also booting on such systems, I can't help but view such efforts as sort of akin to fail0verflow's proof of concept of running Steam on a PS4, kind of a novel hack, but not the sort of thing I would ever want to run in practice.

Meanwhile, T2 chip notwithstanding, VMWare just seems to have completely dropped the ball. Albeit, maybe Parallels has courted favor with Apple? Certainly Parallels was demonstrated on prototype Apple Silicon (maybe DTKs?) before M1 hardware was even shipping. We are only *just now* seeing VMWare Fusion announce Apple Silicon betas. That is really behind the curve. To me, that reads as if VMWare not only accrued technical debt which I already knew based upon who I knew who previously worked there and long since left, but that they have too much hubris, perhaps after Dell's acquisition of EMC in 2015. Given my past experiences with Dell as a vendor, they are more often than not, the sort of vendor to fall prey to cronyism and corporate kickbacks from those who may have a vested interest against Apple.
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.
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.

The potential difficulty you mentioned with VMWare porting their LKM designed Fusion to M1 Macs is noted, and yeah, maybe that is a hurdle for them, but that really wasn't what I was harping on so much as being dumbfounded that VMWare has just apparently completely ignored the 2019 Mac Pro revision for two years now. That they are also late to the game on M1 Silicon betas compared to Parallels, to me, seems symptomatic of more being wrong at VMWare than being right.

Already many years ago, one of my colleagues made a remark along the lines of, "Xen is going to eat VMWare's lunch" and that was before more mature libre/free open source software hypervisors such as KVM, bhyve and vmm were around. I guess the irony is that since AWS transitioned from Xen to KVM, and Jeff Bezos' hegemonic domination in that market demographic with the rise of so-called DevOps and the wide scale abandonment of companies running bare metal hardware (which in my experience is substantially more economical with lower operating costs than SAAS alternatives) that colleague was only partially correct.

My gut intuition is that VMWare had brain drain after the EMC and subsequent Dell acquisitions, and had been coasting on its laurels and now doesn't really have many with the technical chops to keep pace, in a market segment which has become so thoroughly commoditized, it is really a wonder that anyone would pay for a hypervisor anymore.
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.

Yeah, but that doesn't seem like the sort of thing that Apple is likely to embark upon ever. It was already under pretty severe EULA clauses that OS X/macOS was ever permitted to be virtualized, and mandated that users utilize Apple hardware in order to stay in compliance. While finding HOWTOs and code for running OS X within KVM is just a github search away, all of that is in probably more often than not, running in violation of Apple's EULA, just like hackintoshes, and not the sort of thing Apple is ever likely to look kindly upon. Meanwhile, for businesses which do care about compliance, it would seem plausible based upon the current landscape, that they would still buy Apple Mac Pros, but then boot https://t2linux.org/ on them and run OS X/macOS within KVM rather than waste $ on VMWare ESXi, which never facilitated 2019 Mac Pro revisions.

Yet again, libre/free open source software outpacing commercial offerings. I am not surprised by that, so much as disgusted by VMWare/EMC/Dell's hubris.
 
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And this is why I am hanging on to my 2019 MacBook Pro 16 with Bootcamp and Windows 10. I can run a EGPU with a 3080 TI card, I can run Steam games on Windows 10, I can use a Quest 2 VR headset with a link cable. I have 32gb of ram internal and have 4TB of internal and 4TB external with a Thunderbolt 3 SSD drive connected to a Thunderbolt 4 hub. I can run all Mac x86 apps. I am seeing to many I can't with the Apple M processors. I never wanted my MacBook to be a iPhone or a iPad. But Apple do, what Apple wants to do.
 
I like to think of myself as pretty tech savvy but I don’t even begin to know how I would do this!
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’m running CrossOver on my M1 MacBook Air for the few windows apps I need for my work and it works great. Better than in my 2017 15” MacBook Pro.

I also have windows 11 ARM64 pre release running in Parallels 17 when I on a rare occasion need visual studio,
MSSQL and the like. Again, works great.
 
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.

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!
 
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!
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.
 
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.

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.
 
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.
Which puts me right back where we started...

I'm just used to the convenience of being able to spin up a VM on my intel MBP which I won't be able to with Apple Silicon. I have an old Lenovo laptop when I get to Apple Silicon but will really miss the occasional ability to run Windows apps.
 
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.
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.
Fusion Player is there to hurt Parallels by being free. This is the mega corporation that is trying to kill the little guy buy dumping their product on the consumer for free. That should actually be illegal. VMware makes almost no money on selling Fusion. 99.9% of their revenue comes from other products. That’s why they can give Fusion Player away for free.
 
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