VMWare Fusion

[MacNerd1239]

Has anyone else been able to get Monterey to install in VMWare Fusion?

I've been doing the upgrade install, tried both from Catalina and Big Sur and I just end up with a black screen with the spinning gear appearing for a few seconds and then disappearing repeatedly.

Thanks!

 

[pshufd]

Has anyone else been able to get Monterey to install in VMWare Fusion?

I've been doing the upgrade install, tried both from Catalina and Big Sur and I just end up with a black screen with the spinning gear appearing for a few seconds and then disappearing repeatedly.

Thanks!

I've tried many times with VMware/Linux KVM and VirtualBox, both upgrade and direct. It gets into a boot loop for me. There's a gui which says 29 minutes remaining and it gets down to about 18 minutes, crashes out of the GUI to the terminal mode, spits out a bunch of stuff and then goes back into the GUI and 29 minutes remaining. I tried upgrading from Mojave.

I've not tried VMware with the unlocker to install directly - is that what you did to get Catalina and Big Sur running?

 

[gilby101]

Has anyone else been able to get Monterey to install in VMWare Fusion?

All good if you follow https://blog.eucse.com/how-to-run-macos-monterey-12-beta-in-vmware-fusion/ for a clean install.

Host running macOS 11.4 and Fusion 12.1.2 which has the required version of vmtools.

The only change I needed was NOT to make the display changes until after both macOS install and VMware tools install complete. YMMV

Similar instructions are in the VMware forums, but much more terse and fragmented.

 

[hoodafoo]

I'm still on Catalina and recently made a Big Sur VM and it ran SLOOOOW. Is this everyone'e experience? 3D graphics acceleration is not supported unless I update my host to Big Sur. I also have a High Sierra VM that doesn't support 3D graphics but that one runs acceptably slow. Any suggestions?

 

[pshufd]

I'm still on Catalina and recently made a Big Sur VM and it ran SLOOOOW. Is this everyone'e experience? 3D graphics acceleration is not supported unless I update my host to Big Sur. I also have a High Sierra VM that doesn't support 3D graphics but that one runs acceptably slow. Any suggestions?

What's your setup for your virtual machine? VMware running macOS using unlocker?

 

[hoodafoo]

What's your setup for your virtual machine? VMware running macOS using unlocker?

Oh sorry, the thread was VMWare Fusion, so I didn't mention it. I'm running Fusion 12.1.2, 3 procs, 4GB ram, Big Sur 11.4. I don't know what 'unlocker' is

 

[pshufd]

Oh sorry, the thread was VMWare Fusion, so I didn't mention it. I'm running Fusion 12.1.2, 3 procs, 4GB ram, Big Sur 11.4. I don't know what 'unlocker' is

I'm posting in two VM threads so I got confused. Sounds like you're running it directly on a macOS system. unlocker allows you to run macOS VMs under Windows or Linux.

My experience with VMs is that HS, Mojave, Catalina and Monterey are similar in graphics performance but Big Sur is the worst in performance. This was true with my old Mac after upgrading to it and then downgrading back to Mojave. The biggest annoyance was shrinking window which could take five to eight seconds. I think that the latest version of Big Sur is somewhat better.

 

[hoodafoo]

I'm posting in two VM threads so I got confused. Sounds like you're running it directly on a macOS system. unlocker allows you to run macOS VMs under Windows or Linux.

My experience with VMs is that HS, Mojave, Catalina and Monterey are similar in graphics performance but Big Sur is the worst in performance. This was true with my old Mac after upgrading to it and then downgrading back to Mojave. The biggest annoyance was shrinking window which could take five to eight seconds. I think that the latest version of Big Sur is somewhat better.

Oh ok, so it's not just me suffering from lousy performance of Big Sur in a VM. I guess it is what it is

 

[gilby101]

VMware Fusion does not support graphics acceleration for macOS clients.

But there are unsupported hacks based on VMware Fusion Forum which enable higher performance graphics for BS and Monterey client VMs running in Fusion 12 on BS host using the "Apple Paravirtualized Graphics Device". Try adding this to the vmx file:
svga.present="FALSE"
appleGPU0.present="TRUE"

 

[hoodafoo]

VMware Fusion does not support graphics acceleration for macOS clients.

But there are unsupported hacks based on VMware Fusion Forum which enable higher performance graphics for BS and Monterey client VMs running in Fusion 12 on BS host using the "Apple Paravirtualized Graphics Device". Try adding this to the vmx file:
svga.present="FALSE"
appleGPU0.present="TRUE"

Thx, I had already tried this only to find out that I need to upgrade my host to big sur in order for it to work

 

[hoodafoo]

Ok, so now I have a Big Sur host (2017 MacBook) and a Big Sur guest VM and added the

svga.present="FALSE"
appleGPU0.present="TRUE"

to the vmx file and it will no longer boot. Am I doing something wrong? Anyone got it to work?

 

[gilby101]

Ok, so now I have a Big Sur host (2017 MacBook) and a Big Sur guest VM and added the

svga.present="FALSE"
appleGPU0.present="TRUE"

to the vmx file and it will no longer boot. Am I doing something wrong? Anyone got it to work?

My case was BS host and Monterey guest. I had to remove those lines until I had installed VMware Tools. Then I put them back and graphics is much better. It is a matter of experimentation and web searches to find what works best.

 

[hoodafoo]

My case was BS host and Monterey guest. I had to remove those lines until I had installed VMware Tools. Then I put them back and graphics is much better. It is a matter of experimentation and web searches to find what works best.

Thx for the tip, but I just wasted a Saturday afternoon and no luck. While it didn't say "failed to start", it would just indefinitely hang at POST