Any luck using with VMWAre Fusion Tech Preview on Apple Silicon?

Vagrant
1

After seeing the abysmal I/O performance of Docker up close on macOS I decided to give Vagrant a go. Unfortunately, Virtualbox does not run on Apple Silicon (the M1 Macbook), so I thought I was out of luck, until I read that VMWare has its own provider and they just (September) released a Tech Preview of Fusion that runs on Apple Silicon!

So I installed Vagrant, the VMWare utilities, the provider and whatnot and could see something happening, but ultimately failing (resulting in this bug report).

$ vagrant init hashicorp/bionic64

$ vagrant up --provider vmware_desktop
Vagrant encountered an unexpected communications error with the
Vagrant VMware Utility driver.

This could of course be because almost every bit in this equation is bleeding edge (or at least pretty fresh):

  • macOS 12 beta
  • ARM processor (Apple M1)
  • VMWare Fusion Tech Preview

But it could also be that I simply don’t know how one would use Vagrant on vmware. Which I don’t. I have no idea how running (a presumed) x86-64 image on ARM would work (if at all), or if Fusion on ARM is only capable of running ARM images on ARM.

Anyone had success with this or has any knowledge to share?

P.S. All details, debugging output, etc. can be found in the issue, if deemed relevant.

2

A few issues here:

  1. Vagrant does not list any metadata on processor architecture
  2. VMWare Fusion only supports running ARM on ARM, not x86 on ARM.
  3. The vmware provider does not spit out relevant errors.
3

So just an update to close off this thread.

VMWare Fusion runs fine on Apple Silicon.

You can find details on getting it running, with tips on symlinks and the ARM native boxes to use in the mentioned issue for the vmware provider, where a collaborative effort turned fruitful. It was a bit hairy to get all the details, and the UX of getting there was less than great, but you can now cruise quite easily into using it.

That being said, the original intent of me using it was to find some way of getting an older Ubuntu version running on my new Mac. But since Vagrant relies on providers, and neither VirtualBox nor VMWare provides for a way of running amd64 boxes on arm64, this was a dead end for me, as the the old Ubuntu image I needed just existed in a amd64 version. Since Docker for Mac recently got a major speed boost on ARM , I do not really have an immediate interest in pursuing this further :slight_smile:

4

I was struggling with the same issue,

Virtual Box doesn’t support apple M1
VMWare – I am still trying the same error “Vagrant encountered an unexpected communications error with the Vagrant VMware Utility driver.”

Parallels => Successful.

sudo vagrant up --provider=parallels

Parallels provider requires root permission to register the “VM”

5

@ishanku Did you read the related threads on the VMWare issue tracker I linked to above? There is a lot of great info there; enough to get you up and running. Remember to download and rename the Technology Preview version of VMWare.

Here are some good tips on creating vmware boxes: