After 10 years of reliable duty, I’ve decided to replace my MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2012) with a new one. My choice is a new shiny MacBook Pro Model: Mac14,6 with an Apple M2 Max (m2) CPU: 12-core processor and 64 GB RAM.
I was aware of the Silicon CPU architecture being different, but I didn’t want to choose an older model MacBook with an Intel CPU. One of the first things I did was install VMware Fusion Professional version 13.0.2 and spin up a virtual machine with the ESXi on ARM fling. I soon discovered the M2 CPU isn’t supported.
System EL(1) != kernel EL(2) (ESXBootInfo flag 0x1c0004)Error 4 (Unsupported) while loading kernel: /b.b00. kernel is either invalid or corrupted.
Fatal error: 4 (Unsupported)
vSphere ESXi 7.0.x will be the final release supporting Apple Mac platforms (88698)
I had to run something on all those cores, so my next challenge was getting the Photon OS up and running in a Fusion VM. I first tried to deploy the photon-uefi-hw14-5.0-dde71ec57.aarch64.ova file, but surprisingly I got 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.” and I referred me to KB 84273.
Next, I downloaded and attached the photon-5.0-dde71ec57.aarch64.iso to a new virtual machine. After a power-on, the installation started successfully. Some next, next and finish clicks, and the Photon OS was up and running.
I also want to give Windows a try, so I signed up for the Windows Insider program. As a member, you get access to the Windows 11 on Arm Insider Preview. Converting the VHDX into a VMDK is described in the following article: How to install Windows 11 on M1/M2 Mac using VMware Fusion Tech Preview by Jeff Benjamin.
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