The transition from Intel to Apple Silicon Macs has been smooth for most software, thanks to Rosetta 2 compatibility software and app developers who quickly added Apple Silicon support to their software. But the ability to run Windows and Windows apps directly on the hardware through Boot Camp or through a virtual machine is still not officially supported.
But makers of paid virtualization software have been working to close that gap. Parallels Desktop 17 will run the Arm version of Windows 11 in a virtual machine, and yesterday VMware released a beta version of VMware Fusion 12 that can do the same.
VMware’s blog post details some of the changes they’ve made to support Windows 11, many of which parallel the work Parallels has done. To meet Windows 11’s TPM requirement, the software creates an encrypted file that is used to store the same types of data that a real TPM would store on a real PC. VMware also includes a standard 2D graphics driver to properly display the Windows desktop on high-resolution screens, plus a basic network driver.
Virtualizing the Arm version of Windows is still not officially supported by Microsoft. The company licenses the Arm version of Windows only to PC makers who build PCs with Arm processors. This means that you have to jump through a lot of extra hoops to install Windows in VMware Fusion in the first place because you can’t just download an ISO file like you can for the x86 version of Windows. You need to download a Hyper-V disk image of a Windows 11 beta from Microsoft’s Windows Insider site, convert the .VHDX file to a VMware compatible VMDK file with separately downloaded Qemu software, create a virtual machine with that disk file and then continue to install new beta versions as they become available so that the version you are using does not expire.
VMware offers some basic documentation for testers hoping to kick the tires of this new build, but it’s worth noting that Parallels can at least offer to download Windows for you automatically.
If you’re running the Arm version of Windows, you can run most non-3D Windows apps, whether written to run on Arm or x86 processors. Windows has its own Rosetta-esque x86-to-Arm translation, and Windows 11 has improved it by running 64-bit x86 apps and letting developers provide apps that use a combination of Arm and x86 code. This is a little more flexible than Mac developers have: if a Mac app only has x86 dependencies or plugins to run within the host process, the entire app must be launched in x86 mode, even if the rest of the app is Apple Silicon native.
In recent versions of macOS, Apple has built its own virtualization framework, and independent developers have used it to create lightweight, free virtualization software without the cost or complexity of Parallels or VMware. But it doesn’t officially support Windows in any capacity — on Apple Silicon Macs, it supports macOS and Linux VMs.