Mac Mini update

[Eric Maxon]

I just updated from my old mac mini to a 2024 model and V<ware no longer runs.  I receive the following message

This virtual machine cannot be powered on because it requires the X86 machine architecture, which is incompatible with this Arm machine architecture host.

does anyone know how to fix this?

Thanks for the help

Eric

 

[Technogeezer]

"VMware" (Fusion) is running fine. It's the VM that you're trying to bring over from an Intel Mac to an Apple Silicon Mac that's the problem. 

The error message is telling you that Fusion on Apple Silicon (M1/m2/m3/m4) can't run VMs that need an Intel processor (such as those that were built on Fusion on Intel Macs or VMware Workstation on PCs). Apple Silicon processors are ARM CPU chips, not Intel. While Rosetta 2 allows Apple Silicon Macs to run applications built on Intel Macs, it doesn't emulate a full Intel chip that would allow an Intel VM to run. (That's an Apple limitation). 

Parallels has the same limitation, by the way. As does 

The only "fix" is to rebuild the VM using an ARM architecture operating system supported by Fusion, reinstall applications, and migrate data from the old VM (the disks of the old VM can be attached as extra disks to a rebuilt VM). Supported ARM architecture operating systems include Windows 11 ARM (nothing else) and various Linux distributions (most all of them have arm64/aarch64 operating system support). 

Note also that Fusion currently can't run ANY version of macOS as a VM. So if you have an old macOS version that you're keeping around, you're probably out of luck. Same thing for Windows 10, 8, 7, XP, and any Windows Server version. 

The other alternative is to try to convert that VM to run using an Intel CPU emulator product such as UTM (no guarantees, though, how well that converted VM will run under Intel emulation). 

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- Paul (technogeezer)
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