Recently VMware released VMware Fusion 13 which also runs on Apple Silicon. So for us Mac users we have now run Windows on our mac.
In this post, I’ll explain how to get through the first steps and how to fix the issue of no network during setup!
Prepping the image
First off I’ll assume you have VMware Fusion 13 installed on your mac device.
Next up download the latest version of the Windows 11 ARM preview here. You may need to register for the Windows insider program to retrieve the image.
Problem with this image is, it is in VHDX format, which runs fine on (client) Hyper-V on Windows machines but you can’t import it directly into VMware Fusion.
To fix this you need to convert the image using the Qemu-img tooling you can install this on a Windows machine but if you have a Mac you can use Homebrew.
Installing Homebrew is really easy and you can follow the instructions on the website.
After installing Homebrew you need to install the Qemu-img tooling on your Mac. You can to this by typing these commands:
| brew install qemu |
After installing qemu you can run this command to convert the image from VHDX to VMDK. Just to let you know, you need to run this with the correct directory formatting. You also need at least 10 GB of free disk space to accommodate the image’s conversion.
| qemu-img convert -p -O vmdk “Windows11_InsiderPreview_Client_ARM64_en-us_22598.VHDX” windows11.vmdk |
Installing Windows 11
After this, create a new vm in VMware Fusion. Choose: create a custom virtual machine (because you have to add the newly created VMware disk).
Select Microsoft Windows and choose the Windows 11 64-bit Arm OS.
Next step is to add the converted disk to the VM. In my case, I already created a folder in my Virtual Machines folder where I moved the VMDK to. This was to save some space. You need to select use an existing virtual disk and find your disk(in my case in the Virtual machines folder that already existed. The rest of the VM data will automatically be deployed inside the folder containing the VMDK file.
When choosing the disk select take this disk away from the virtual machine currently using it. This will ensure that the disk is not copied and that you can
After completing the configuration, boot up the VM. First up are the standard questions for installing Windows 11.
Choose the correct keyboard for your VM.
You can choose to add an extra keyboard if needed. In the next step, you need to connect to a network, but there’s the caveat the network driver hasn’t loaded yet so to add that you need to install VMware tools or you can change the OOBE experience, I’ll explain both possibilities.
For both solutions you need to go to the command prompt, you can do this by pushing the Shift + FN +F10 keys. this will start a command prompt.
Solution 1 change OOBE experience
type the following command in the command prompt
| OOBE \BYPASSNRO |
This will reboot the VM and you rerun the setup where you have the option for I don’t have internet and it will run a local install with a local user account. After installation has completed you can log on to the VM. when you have logged on start a Powershell session as and administrator.
When the Powershell window is open type the following command and type Y to confirm.
| set-executionpolicy remotesigned |
Next step is to mount the VMware tools DVD. For this go to the VMware Fusion menu and choose virtual Machines and select reinstall VMware tools
VMware tools DVD is then mounted to the VM after clicking the install button
Solution 2 install VMware tools during setup
After starting the command prompt type Powershell to start a Powershell session. After you start Powershell run this command
| set-executionpolicy remotesigned |
Next step is to mount the VMware tools DVD, you can do this by navigating to the VMware Fusion menu and choose virtual machines and then choose Reinstall VMware tools
Choose install on the popup to verify you are mounting the VMware tools installer to the VM
Browse via the Powershell session to the DVD drive and run setup.ps1. This will do exactly the same as solution 1 and will install the Vesa and VMXnet3 drivers.
After that complete the setup. Hope this helps someone 🙂