Powering Up Your Macs with Apple Silicon
We are thrilled to announce the release of VMware Fusion Tech Preview 2023, marking a significant leap forward for our virtualization software on macOS.
With this release, we are dramatically improving our experience with Windows 11 on Fusion on Macs with Apple silicon and the new macOS Sonoma, while also unveiling subtle new functionality for working with encrypted virtual machines programmatically, as well as security enhancements.
And we want your feedback!
Full 3D Acceleration on Windows 11 for Arm
We are particularly excited to introduce full 3D hardware accelerated graphics for Windows 11 on Arm with Fusion on Macs with Apple silicon. This upgrade brings a new level of graphics performance to Fusion, empowering users to run full DirectX 11 3D games and apps with stunning fidelity and speed. The UI is much more responsive, and when combined with autofit, resolution changes are nearly instant.
Now, not only can you take full advantage of your Mac’s computing power for productivity tasks, but you can also immerse yourself in a breathtaking gaming or multimedia experience. And yes, that includes running emulated 32-bit and 64-bit games!
VMware Tools on Apple silicon
Other more noteworthy bits of the Fusion 2023 Tech Preview include the dramatic improvements in support for the Arm version of Windows 11 on Macs with Apple silicon. This Tech Preview now delivers support for the vast majority of VMware Tools features available for Windows VMs on Fusion for Intel Macs.
We’ve managed to put together what seems like an impossibly fast drag-and-drop and clipboard sharing between the Mac and Windows 11.
Autofit instantly resizes the guest resolution when you drag the console window.
These and other silent features like time sync work together to make your Windows 11 for Arm VMs feel more at home on the Mac than ever.
Enhancing Security and Control
Security continues to be at the heart of VMware Fusion. The 2023 Tech Preview brings security fixes, and introduces an improved encryption scheme (XTS instead of CBC) for maximum protection with a reduced performance overhead. VMs that are encrypted via CBC (such as those with TPMs like Windows 11) will be prompted to upgrade to the new encryption cipher at boot. Note that the new scheme is only available with the Fusion 2023 Tech Preview and newer (i.e. the full release slated for later this year), and is not backwards compatible. While we’ve not encountered any issues with the conversion, we do recommend folks take a full backup or clone of the VM before performing the upgrade. Any errors here should be reported to us via the community right away so we can address them before our full release!
From an operations perspective, Fusion has also expanded our REST API (vmrest) and Command-Line Interface (vmrun) tools to now support encrypted VMs and those with Virtual Trusted Platform Modules (vTPMs).
Call To Action
How can you participate? It’s easy, and it’s free!
- Download and install the Fusion 2023 Tech Preview
- Check out the Testing Guide
- Install or Upgrade Windows 11 and install VMware Tools! (step by step instructions in the Testing Guide)
- Play some games, run some apps, do what you do!
- Let us know how it went in the Fusion 2023 Tech Preview VMTN Community
Even More Coming Soon…
These updates are most welcomed, but we’re still not quite done with what the Fusion has to offer in 2023… We have a few more exciting features and improvements in the pipeline which are not included in Tech Preview 2023 that we can’t wait to share!
For now, this is just a sneak peek of what’s coming in the following months, and we hope to get your feedback on it so and maybe iron out a bug or two along the way!
Stay tuned for more exciting updates as we continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible with VMware Fusion.
Happy virtualizing!
