Fusion 25H2 is released and available now!

[Technogeezer]

Today (14-October-2025), Broadcom announced new versions of the desktop hypervisor products (Workstation and Fusion). Not only have they announced new versions, but they've changed the versioning nomenclature, added features, and expanded host and guest operating system support. Read more on the announcement at https://blogs.vmware.com/cloud-foundation/2025/10/14/vmware-workstation-fusion-25h2-embracing-calendar-versioning-and-new-features/

For Fusion, the big change seems to be that macOS 26 Tahoe is now an officially qualified host operating system for Fusion.  One other nicety is the inclusion of a command line utility for inspecting and making changes to virtual machine configuration files. This should eliminate the need to use a text editor to make .vmx file changes, and should help users that are using automation tools to deploy virtual machines. 

It doesn't look like the Fusion 25H2 release notes have hit the Broadcom product documentation site yet. I'll update this thread when I find them. 

Fusion 25H2 is available for download from the free software downloads section of the Broadcom support portal.

One thing to note from the blog post for the announcement is the availability of an updated FAQ document for the desktop hypervisor products https://www.vmware.com/docs/desktop-hypervisor-faqs . It might be worthwhile to take a look at it as it's attempting to clarify the licensing and support policies for Workstation and Fusion. It also contains clarifications on the removal of in-product updates (some of the "whys" behind the decision). 

Please report any problems you are encountering with Fusion 25H2 as new discussion posts  and not as a reply to this thread. That will make them easier to respond to and stay on-topic. Thanks. 

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- Paul (technogeezer)
vExpert 2025
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[Gaurav Joshi]

Fusion release notes is here:

Fusion-25h2-release-notes

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[Technogeezer]

Thanks @Gaurav Joshi. It looks like the release notes have now made their way through the content distribution infrastructure and can be found on the tech docs portal.  

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- Paul (technogeezer)
vExpert 2025
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[Technogeezer]

Heads up to anyone using VoiceOver. The release notes for Fusion 25H2 indicate that if you have VoiceOver enabled, VMs will crash on startup. According to Broadcom, this issue has been reported to Apple, indicating to me that this may be an Apple issue similar to what happened with VoiceOver on early releases of Sequoia.

You may want to avoid upgrading to Tahoe at this time if you need to use VoiceOver and Fusion. 

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- Paul (technogeezer)
vExpert 2025
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[Cory Samaha]

Hi @Technogeezer,

Thank you for the heads up about VoiceOver with Tahoe. Unfortunately I am a VoiceOver user, so it looks like I will need to defer upgrading a while longer.

Just to be clear, is the VoiceOver issue a problem with Fusion 25H2, or Tahoe, or the combination of both? As I haven't updated to Tahoe yet, I wasn't sure, but I didn't see anything posted here about VoiceOver issues with Tahoe using Fusion 13.6.4.

Please keep us updated on this issue, too bad I can't upgrade just yet.

[Technogeezer]

I'm inclined to believe that this is a regression in Tahoe. It would be interesting to see if someone running Sequoia reports back on what they find running VoiceOver and Fusion 25H2.

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- Paul (technogeezer)
vExpert 2025
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[Neethu Kumar Swamy]

@Cory Samaha  This is only present on Tahoe, it has been reported to Apple. VoiceOver works fine on Sequoia with Fusion 25H2.

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[Neethu Kumar Swamy]

VoiceOver issue is present on Tahoe, and it has been reported to Apple. VoiceOver works fine on Sequoia with Fusion 25H2.

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[Technogeezer]

Just FYI the Voice Over issue still is present with Fusion and Tahoe 26.1 (just upgraded and powering on the VM still fails). 

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- Paul (technogeezer)
vExpert 2025
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[Cory Samaha]

Thanks so much Paul for testing this. I was curious if the VoiceOver issue was fixed and don't have a spare machine on which to test. Looks like I'll be staying with Sequoia a bit longer. I'll check back whenever we get 26.2, I guess. lol

[maiku2394]

Running Windows 11 Arm on MacOS 15.6.1, upgraded vmware tools to the included version, but now I'm stuck with a massively oversized cursor. I double-checked the accessibility settings for the cursor size, and it is set to the smallest size, but it appears way larger than the increased size cursor on the right side of the slider.

The window resizing cursor is also massive, but the text selection cursor seems normal size.

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[maiku2394]

On another M2 macbook running Tahoe (and Windows 11 ARM in Fusion), with the laptop screen as towards the "more space" setting, and external monitor using the "default" size setting, the cursor is huge on the laptop screen, but becomes normal size when the Fusion window is dragged to the external monitor.

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[CarlinSmith]

Seeing this behavior as well with all Linux VMs.  However my Windows 11 25H2 VM DOES NOT have this issue.

The following VMs for me all have the bizarrely sized cursor issue.  I tested before I upgraded the underlying virtual hardware to 21 and not related to this.

• CentOS Stream (Latest Version)
• Debian 13.1
• Fedora 42
• OpenSUSE Leap (Latest Version)
• Oracle Linux 9.6
• Oracle Linux 10
• Red Hat Linux 9.6
• Red Hat Linux 10
• Ubuntu 25.10

There is another issue I noticed with VMs based on the Red Hat source.  They all booted up with the wired interfaced disconnected.  I was able to simply reconnect the interface and subsequent reboots it held fine.  The VMs that exhibited this behavior were:

• CentOS Stream
• Oracle Linux 9.6
• Oracle Linux 10
• Red Hat Linux 9.6
• Red Hat Linux 10

Based on the commonality to the Red Hat tree would have expected Fedora 42 to also have this issue but it did not.

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[Technogeezer]

I haven't seen the cursor size issue personally (might be because I'm running a non-Retina/non-HIDPI monitor). I have seen the wired networking behavior, but as @CarlinSmith notes it was easily re-connected.

It appears that the virtual network card got moved to a different device name in the guest (from ens160 to enp2s0). I'm not sure if that's due to the Fusion upgrade or Tahoe upgrade. I saw similar behavior when running Fusion 13.6.4 under Tahoe when I upgraded from Sequoia. Adding a new profile for the new device (or editing the old NetworkManager profile through nmtui to reflect the new device name) restored networking for me.

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- Paul (technogeezer)
vExpert 2025
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[ozsmacd]

I have this exact issue right now with my two Ubuntu VMs after the upgrade to 25H2, just need to remember how to resolve (don't have nmtui installed, and no network working).

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[CarlinSmith]

Some further information - had a hunch this might be related to whether you allow Full Retina resolution for the VM itself.  My Windows 11 VM has this setting on and scaled in the OS to 200% HiDPI.  The cursor is fine in that VM.

For my Linux VMs I don't normally have this setting on.  I switched it on and was able to scale the OS similar to windows to 200% zoom and that corrected the cursor issue.  However, this introduces other issues as the VM (regardless of Linux distro) doesn't remember the settings or size between reboots which might be more annoying than the 4x size cursor.

In short there is something in the windowing model off and a new defect created that didn't exist previously.

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[Technogeezer]

I've found that unless you choose one of the "standard" window sizes that's available via the in-guest display settings, the size of the resized window doesn't always "stick" between logins/reboots. . That's not new behavior with 25H2 and Tahoe. 

The bigger issue IMO is that the VMware virtual graphics adapter has no idea about passing Retina/HiDPI status to the VM. 

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- Paul (technogeezer)
vExpert 2025
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[palter]

The cursor size issue also applies when I connect to an ESXi host and use Fusion to show the screen of a remote VM. Fortunately, I've setup all my remote VMs to be accessible through either RealVNC or Window RDP where the cursors behave normally.

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Mac mini (M4 Pro/48GB/2TB), ESXi on Intel NUC10i5FNH1 (64GB/250GB/2TB),
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[CarlinSmith]

Seem there is another new regression which at least for me on two machines the titles of VM is no longer displayed in the menu bar of the VM. See attached screenshot.

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[Technogeezer]

That's one behavior I'm not seeing. The only time that I don't see the VM name at the top of the window is when I select View > Hide Toolbar from the Fusion menu bar. 

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- Paul (technogeezer)
vExpert 2025
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[CarlinSmith]

I went ahead and customized the toolbar and added it back - sorta strange

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[Technogeezer]

Agreed. I'm wondering if some of what you're seeing is due to Apple making changes in Tahoe to support the new "Liquid Glass" look?

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- Paul (technogeezer)
vExpert 2025
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[Technogeezer]

Two additional notes about Fusion 25H2 

Supported Fusion host operating systems aren't what you'd expect.

Per the Fusion 25H2 Using VMware Fusion section "System requirements for Fusion Pro"  Fusion 25H2 has dropped support for macOS 13 Ventura and macOS 14 Sonoma. It's only qualified to run on macOS 15 Sequoia and macOS 26 Tahoe. The last qualified Fusion version for Ventura and Sonoma would therefore be Fusion 13.6.4.

Included VMware Tools version has been updated

Fusion 25H2 has "up-rev'd" the included versions of VMware Tools to 13.0.1. You'll still need to download "legacy" versions of VMware Tools (e.g. Windows XP or macOS) separately from Broadcom. 

The bundled VMware Tools 13.0.1 packages for Windows Intel and ARM do not contain fixes for a VMware Tools privilege escalation issue disclosed by Broadcom in security advisory VMSA-2025-0015 on 30-September-2025. You'll need to download VMware Tools 13.0.5 from Broadcom's support portal to obtain fixes for those issues.

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- Paul (technogeezer)
vExpert 2025
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[Emil Vissing]

Hello,

I just tested out 25H2 on my MBP M1Max (15.7.1) and I noticed an issue when testing some things around secure boot and deploying custom keys: I'm not able to access the Secure Boot Configuration in the BIOS after adding the necessary option in the .vmx

The Secure Boot Configuration BIOS menu appears, but everything freezes once I attempt to enter it. I'm not sure if it was a supported scenario to begin with though.

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[Technogeezer]

What "advanced option option" did you add to the .vmx file? Also, what guest OS are you running?

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- Paul (technogeezer)
vExpert 2025
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[George Yohng]

There's a cursor size problem in Windows Guest and an incorrect cursor offset problem with Linux Guest with 25H2.  No such problems with 13.6.4, same VMs. It's possible that the mouse cursor pointer display implementation is broken. Eagerly waiting for an update that fixes it, thanks.

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