VMWare Fusion W10 to W11

[VMware Community Member]

There are lots of conflicting articles of how to Upgrade a Fusion 13.5 Windows 10 to Windows 11. Is there a step by step process somewhere .

[Nathan Savolskis]

I always start with VMware docs/KBs first - when I run into problems, then I come to this community to poll for answers to very specific problems.

https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Fusion/13/com.vmware.fusion.using.doc/GUID-C893D6C8-0408-45E8-A388-F2B4F8AFDFB2.html

Is there a specific issue you're running into, or is it really just having a clear plan out of all the available resources?

[Technogeezer]

I haven’t seen a step by step procedure but here are some thoughts.

Before doing anything, power off (not suspend) the VM and remove all snapshots. Shut down Fusion and make a copy of of the VM to another disk. You now have a copy of the VM to go back to should something ho horribly wrong  

Most of the difficulties you have to upgrade the VM will be related to Windows 11 requirements  

Start by downloading PC Health Check in the Windows 10 VM from Microsoft and running it. . Examine where it may flag that you can’t upgrade to Windows 11.

If it says you have an unsupported processor, you will need to search the web on how to add registry entries to Windows so that the upgrade installer will run on an unsupported CPU. Fusion exposes the underlying CPU that you have in your Mac to the VM, and if it isn’t on Windows 11 supported list, you won’t be able to upgrade without the registry hack  

If you are running the VM with BIOS firmware, you need to again search the web for information on how to convert it to EFI. This will also will involve changing the setting of the firmware in Fusion.

If your virtual disk is formatted as an MBR disk, it will need to be converted to GPT format  Consult the web for info on how to do this  There’s nothing in Fusion involved with this  

Windows 11 requires a TPM device. Encrypt the VM using Fusion’s “only the files needed to support a TPM”. Then add the TPM device. If you don’t have a TPM device, you’ll need registry hacks in Windows to disable the check for a TPM.

Make sure your VM has 2 CPUs and a minimum 64 GB disk size. These are Windows 11 requirements. You can resize the virtual disk if necessary, but you will need to use utilities within the VM to resize the C drive’s partition once the disk is resized. 

[VMware Community Member]

Hi Paul

Thanks for your reply. I am hoping this would work

1. Create a New Windows 11 VM from a Windows 11 ISO

2. Import from the VM Windows 10 and hope all the existing software on the Windows 10 will now run on the Windows 11 VM

Does this make sense , i've researched Fusion import and it seem to indicate this would work ?

 

 

[Technogeezer]

---

 wrote:

Hi Paul

Thanks for your reply. I am hoping this would work

1. Create a New Windows 11 VM from a Windows 11 ISO

2. Import from the VM Windows 10 and hope all the existing software on the Windows 10 will now run on the Windows 11 VM

Does this make sense , i've researched Fusion import and it seem to indicate this would work ?

---

Fusion has no utility to transfer data and applications from an existing system/VM into a new VM.  Entire VMs, yes. Data within that VM, no.

What you're looking to do is pretty much what you'd have to do if you bought a new physical PC and wanted to transfer everything from your old PC. You'll need to use other Windows mechanisms to transfer data. That includes using things like One Drive, backing up the old VM to an external USB disk and attaching it to the new one, configuring the new VM to access the virtual disk of the old one, or using third-party Windows utilities.

One thing that's easier to do with a VM is to attach the old VM's disks to the virtual machine as an additional disk. This is the equivalent to opening up a physical PC, extracting the drive, and installing the hard drive in the new PC as a second disk. 

As far as applications go, Microsoft says that Windows 11 is built on the underpinnings of Windows 10. It's very likely that the applications you have on Windows 10 will run on Windows 11.  I'd reinstall applications in your new Windows 11 VM rather than trying to rely on copying them over from an existing installation.

 

[VMware Community Member]

Hi Paul

You are correct , i found out the hard way. Should have listened to you , I guess it seemed a daunting task and since this is my live machine was scared. I cloned the VM and followed the steps. And it worked . I will delete the clone and re-do this once i have a spare moment and two backups of my Live VM. I will just switch to GPT/TMP for now and then Upgrade WIN 10 to WIN 11 when i have time. I tested all my software on the Clone and all worked.

 

Thanks for your help

 

[Oaf]

Hi Paul,

I have a VM on my Intel Mac that started out in Windows 7 and over the years I upgraded it to Windows 10 and I'd now like to upgrade it to Windows 11. I'm about to buy a new Apple Silicon Mac that (I believe) can only run a Windows 11 VM. I mostly have the VM for one program that I need, but I've long since lost the installation media for that program (which has stored it's licensing files in various hidden places within the VM that I know nothing about). I want to make sure the program works with Windows 11 before buying the new hardware. My problem is that the W10 VM is not EFI and I tried to convert it using mbr2gpt but it was like peeling an onion where one thing didn't complete fully because something else needed fixing and then that process didn't work for a similar reason... Very frustrating and I was unable to do it. 

I get that VMWare can't migrate just the data from another VM, but from within my newly created Windows 11 VM am I able to run the Windows equivalent of the Mac's Migration Assistant if I can sling these two VMs together? I'm sorry that I'm so Windows illiterate. What program would that be? I also have lots of spare space on my Mac (in the hope that I could just store any intermediate files there). Thanks.

[Technogeezer]

 

Ouch.

Converting a BIOS/MBR Windows system to EFI/GPT even for physical machines is not an easy task. It's a multi-step technically challenging endeavor. At least with a virtual machine you can checkpoint your progress by taking backups of a VM between steps. You have to be much more careful with a physical PC. 

Looking over what you want to do, switching your VM to Windows 11 is the least of your problems, and won't get you to a new Apple Silicon Mac.  The critical problem here is that Microsoft doesn't provide a way to run an upgrade install of WIndows 11 ARM on a Windows x86_64 installation and preserve data and/or applications.  Switching processor architectures is a complete re-install that wipes all data on the disk.

You can certainly configure a Windows 11 ARM VM with a second virtual disk that is the disk of your old VM - even an Intel one. That second disk will mount on the ARM VM. It then becomes a Windows question on how you migrate what's on the old VM. Certainly copying the data is the easy part. But this application (especially if it has an opaque licensing mechanism) is going to be a challenge.

From my experience, Microsoft doesn't have a utility like the macOS Migration Assistant. If you're migrating to a new PC, their recommendations found at  https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/move-your-files-to-a-new-windows-pc-c7bb3950-cdf6-40d4-8db3-a2d4f687fa4b are either to back up your data to an external drive or use OneDrive to migrate your data. Note that they say nothing about migrating applications.

Anything more than moving your data and you'll probably have to look at third-party migration tools. I don't have any experience with those, so unless someone here does you'll probably get a better answer over at a Microsoft forum (such as the Microsoft Community). You may be in uncharted territory if you say you want to move applications, etc, from Windows x86_64 to Windows ARM - you may find that because of the relative scarcity of Windows 11 ARM in the market that the tools may not be designed to handle this type of migration  And there's no guarantee that those utilities would be able to deal with the arcane licensing scheme of that program.

Sorry I can't be of more help here.

[Oaf]

Thanks for your response, Paul. It's been a monumental ordeal (many days of trial and error), but I finally do have a Windows 10 EFI/GPT conversion done that now meets the Windows 11 update requirements. If you like, I can document what I had to do, although there are no guarantees the procedure will work for others (because it's Microsoft and Windows we're dealing with). I'm currently installing Windows 11 over my existing Windows 10 VM - that should complete in an hour, although every time I've said that I've been out by a factor of 5 or more.

I've read that W11 ARM has a built-in Intel emulator, so that gives me some hope migrating is possible, although I can see that it's still one big mine-field... I have my fingers crossed somebody out there has written a viable Migration Assistant for Windows 11. 

Interestingly, when I get my new Apple Silicon Mac I'm fully expecting a lot of Apple hand-holding to be able to migrate my Intel world over. I understand I may have to download ARM versions of some apps, but all the migrated files will at least all be in the right place and hopefully their emulator (Rosetta?) will at least get me off the ground. Surely the same scenario exists for Windows folks moving from Intel to ARM, right? Anyway, I'm not trying to take this thread off the rails and start a new discussion - just grizzling while I watch the Windows progress meter make its way to 100%. And, yes, I know after that completes it'll only be replaced with many more because why have only one progress meter when you can break the task into many pieces and put up a separate progress meter for each one... :-/.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Unfortunately you cannot migrate an intel win11 to an arm win11 - it's a rebuild/reinstall for all the software.    I'm doing that this weekend for my dad for his tax software vm.

 

[Technogeezer]

Apple’s hand-holding for Intel to Apple Silicon works very well for just about everything except virtualization (and that means both Parallels and. VMware). The macOS Migration Assistant has evolved into a viable tool to help you migrate from an old Mac to a new one. And Rosetta takes care of running almost all applications that run on Intel Macs.

Unfortunately Rosetta can’t work to run virtual machines - that’s not what Apple built it for. Hence the need to rebuild VMs with ARM architecture versions and the need to migrate apps and data as if you were switching to a new physical PC.  

[VMware Community Member]

Don't know if this will help or save people time. I started the Windows 10 to 11 Update . Of course i backed up the VM and also created a clone.

The Windows Installation assistant fired up and 3 failed with the Error 0x8007000d. Researched and then used sfc/scannow at Windows Command Prompt running as Admin. Retried the Windows Installation assistant , same error . Disabled Antii Virus and retied same error

3 hours later . I decided to download the ISO for Windows 11.

Mounted the ISO and executed the Setup.exe. This started working took a couple of hours but eventually Windows 10 was updated and am now running Windows 11. I have year of software installed on the VM and they all worked .

Results:

After the initial waste of time with Windows Installation assistant and switching to ISO update all went well

- All installed software works

- System is faster

- No issues encountered , with Devices and connectivity

PS: ensure you have  a good amount of disk available since you will have a Backup of Win10 also on the disk

 

[Oaf]

Thanks for your thoughts permaz.  I had already turned my VM into Windows 11 but the inability to migrate to ARM has stalled me. The following may appear cryptic, but it's the notes I made in a readme file after getting to Windows 11. Hopefully it's of some use to somebody else:

 

I started down this road because I had an Intel MacBook Pro with a Windows 10 VM that I used ONLY to run a legacy program for which I no longer had the installation disks. I was about to about to purchase a new Apple Silicon (ARM architecture) MacBook Pro and I heard that ONLY VMs using the ARM version Windows 11 will work. As such, I wanted to move my existing VM from Windows 10 to Windows 11 on my Intel MacBook Pro to make sure the program still worked and then I would worry about migrating my Intel Windows 11 VM to ARM Windows 11. After performing all the steps below to get my VM working in Windows 11 on my Intel Mac I subsequently found out there is no way to migrate that VM to the ARM version of Windows 11 i.e. it was all done for nothing and now I'm definitely rethinking my new MacBook Pro purchase :-(.

There are many steps to make a Windows 10 VM ready for Windows 11 and the order is important.

Allocate 4GB RAM and 2 cores for the VM

You'll also need a minimum of 64G hard disk. This is tricky if you don't already have that much allocated. If you don't then allocate 65GB to the hard disk. That just tacks free space at the end, however the main partition that needs to be 64GB is NOT the last partition i.e. the extra space just added is not added to the main partition, all you did was create an empty partition at the end. Now you need to move the partitions around so that the main partition is beside the new empty partition so they can be merged. This is done within the VM itself using a free utility - there are many, I used NIUBU Partition Editor. It's a little counter-intuitive but it gets the job done. Given that the last partition is the empty space you just created, select the partition beside the last one and then slide it's contents all the way to the right to effectively shift the free space partition to the left. Keep doing that until the free space is to the right of the main partition and you're ready to hit the Apply icon. It will then reboot and after you're done your main partition will be bigger. Confirm all is good by running Disk Management.

Unfortunately, my Windows 10 VM did not use the EFI firmware or the GUID partitioning that is mandatory for Windows 11 so this was a messy affair to fix. The following ended up being the right procedure.

Search for "cmd" and then right-click on the selection and select the option for running as administrator

run the command "mbr2gpt /convert /allowfullos"

If it completes without errors then great. Mine completed with:
Call WinReReapir to repair WinRE
MBR2GPT: Failed to update ReAgent. xm1, please try to manually disable and enable WinRE.
MBR2GPT: Before the new system can boot properly you need to switch the firmware to boot to UEFI mode!
That was worrying, but it turns out you can ignore it.

Shut down the VM and fully quit Fusion

Locate the VM in the Finder, right-click on it and do "Show Package Contents"

Edit the .vmx file and add the line:
firmware = "efi"

Start up Fusion but don't run the VM

In the tools window select the Encryption icon and then select the middle option "Only the files needed to support a TPM". You'll need to provide an encryption/decryption password.

At the top right of the tools window click on Add Device and then select TPM

Start up the VM, and go to the Windows Update control panel

Follow the links to download "PC Health Check" from Microsoft and run that. Hopefully now it'll say your Windows 10 VM is ready to be upgraded to Windows 11. Stupidly, the Windows Update control panel will likely still say your VM is NOT good for a Windows 11 update. Apparently it takes a day or two for the control panel to check with head office to make that determination. No amount of restarting or checking for updates forces it to realize it's Windows 11 ready. Everybody complains about it and Microsoft apparently are never going to fix that. If "PC Health Check" says you're good then that's all that matters.

From within the VM, download the version of Windows 11 you want from Microsoft's website as an ISO. I selected the Home version. Double-click on the ISO and then double-click on Setup.exe. During the install you'll be asked for a product key - just ignore that, Windows 11 will still work (with restrictions) once installed. Note that despite selecting the Home version ISO I ended up with the Pro version of Windows 11 :-/.

[hollistonma]

@Oaf,

Thank you for the step by step instructions.  Made it easy to get Windows 10 running in Fusion on my MBP ready for Windows 11.

When you used the IOS to install Windows 11, did you have to reinstall apps?  I have two apps for which I may not have installation discs so would like to upgrade without having to reinstall apps.

Information on the Internet suggests that I should upgrade within Windows 11 if I want to keep the apps (and data).

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Pacoinmass
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[Technogeezer]

I would think that existing apps would be preserved.

The inability to in-place upgrade an Intel Windows VM to Windows 11 ARM is 100% a Microsoft problem. They don't have a mechanism in their installers/upgraders to switch architectures. The only option to migrate from Intel to ARM is the "fork lift" upgrade - install Windows 11 ARM as a new VM, install all the applications you need and then restore your user's files from the old VM. Fortunately you can configure the old VMs virtual boot drive as a additional drive to your new VM and  copy the files.

If the Intel CPU in your Mac is earlier than an 8th generation Core processor, PC Health Check will tell you that you can't upgrade to Windows 11 from windows 10 - even if you have met the memory, disk, TPM, and Secure Boot requirements. It will say you're using an unsupported processor. You'll need to research registry settings that will allow the Windows 11 setup to upgrade Windows 10 on an unsupported CPU. 

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- Paul (technogeezer)
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