VMware Fusion 13 is GA – Install Windows 11 on M1/M2 Mac using VMware Fusion

There is no doubt that VMware Fusion is one of the best (if not the best) hypervisor software to run macOS, Windows, Linux, and other x86-based operating systems as virtual machines on your Mac computer. Recently VMware released version 13 of the product to support the Intel or Apple Silicon Mac. This means now they are supporting Microsoft Windows 11 and now you should be able to run it on your M1/M2 Mac using macOS 12 Monterey and macOS 13 Ventura.

In this tutorial, I am going to show you how to install Windows 11 ARM on your M1/M2 Mac. Below you find the links to the VMware Fusion 13 product line announcement and also release notes to find the requirements and some other useful information.

VMware Fusion 13 Pro and Player are Here!
VMware Fusion 13 Release Notes

What do we need:

In the first step, we need to purchase VMware Fusion 13 Pro or download the Player version where you can register for the product and use it for free for personal use using this Link.
Also, we need to download the Windows 11Client ARM64 Insider Preview. This product comes in VHDX Format which means we need to convert it to a Virtual Machine Disk, or VMDK since VMware Fusion cannot natively read VHDX files. What is Insider Program?

So let’s start the installation by converting the VHDX to VMDK. For this, we need to install the QEMU which is a free and open-source emulator. And for installing QEMU we need to have Homebrew installed on our Mac. Homebrew is a free and open-source software package management system that simplifies the installation of software on Apple’s operating system, macOS, as well as Linux.

Install Homebrew:
Step 1: Open Terminal.
Step 2: Paste the following command in Terminal and press Return on your keyboard:
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
Step 3: Enter the following commands to add Homebrew to your PATH:
echo '# Set PATH, MANPATH, etc., for Homebrew.' >> /Users/mehdikhodaeifard/.zprofile
echo 'eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"' >> /Users/mehdikhodaeifard/.zprofile
eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/brew shellenv)"

Install QEMU using Homebrew:
Open Terminal and run the following command:
brew install qemu

Convert Windows 11 VHDX to VMDK

Now we’ll use QEMU to convert the Windows 11 VHDX container to a VMDK container. so what I have done is, I just created the folder called Windows 11 under my Download folder and changed my Terminal directory to the Windows 11 folder using the “cd” command, and then run the following command to convert the format:
qemu-img convert -O vmdk Windows11_InsiderPreview_Client_ARM64_en-us_22598.VHDX Windows11.vmdk

So now we have our Windows 11 VMDK file ready, we can go ahead and create the VMware Fusion VM.

Create a Windows 11 ARM Virtual Machine and Setup Windows

Now is the time to create a VMware Fusion Virtual Machine. I have placed the screenshot of each step since I am lazy typing them 🙂

We are done configuring our VM and now we have running Windows 11.