VM start up

[Mitch Harrison]

having troubles with fusion

To upgrade, power off this virtual machine and choose "Virtual Machine > Settings… > Compatibility".

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

Can't get past this step. It works on my laptop

[Technogeezer]

What is the Mac model of your laptop, and what is the Mac model of the machine where you are trying to power on this VM? I would be willing to bet that your laptop where the VM works is an Intel Mac and you're moving that VM to an Apple Silicon (M-series) Mac  

This message tends to show up when you try to power on a VM that was built on an Intel Mac on a Apple Silicon Mac. VMs built on an Intel Mac can only run on Macs that have Intel CPUs, and Apple Silicon CPUs are not Intel CPUs -  that's what the error message is telling you.

VMs that you run on Apple Silicon Macs must use operating systems that are built for the ARM CPU (arm64 or aarch64) architecture, not 32- or 64-Bit Intel.

You'll need to rebuild that VM with an ARM version of the operating system (for example if you want a Windows VM, you'll need to build it with Windows 11 ARM), reinstall your applications, and transfer the data from your old VM to your new one. 

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- Paul (technogeezer)
vExpert 2025
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