Exploring Virtualisation using VMWare Fusion
and figuring out where to go from here.
Why?
I wanted a way to set up a homelab without spending a lot of money (if any). My daily driver is a Macbook Air and when studying for my CompTIA A+ exam, Windows 10/11 settings came up frequently. I wanted to be able to play around with various settings, maybe try out some basic networking without going to the trouble of buying a new device.
How?
My setup:
- Model Name: MacBook Air
- Chip: Apple M1 (arm64)
- Total Number of Cores: 8 (4 performance and 4 efficiency)
- Memory: 16 GB
After noodling around on Reddit I initially tried UTM. Supposedly it runs ARM64 OSs on Apple Silicon at 'near native speeds'. I found it was a bit buggy - had issues with black screens and installing the Windows image. I chose to uninstall it and went with VMWare Fusion Pro instead, free for personal use. Seemed a better choice because it comes up a lot in job ads.
I downloaded the Windows 11 image from the Windows Insider Preview Builds, after registering for the program.
From there it was pretty straightforward - setting up a virtual machine (VM) with the Windows 11 ISO I downloaded earlier, and just following the wizard. I chose UEFI Secure Boot in case the process was buggy like with UTM, but it wasn't.
I also set up an Ubuntu Server VM with the ISO from Canonical. A few months back I asked Claude for a tutorial to set up a server and I thought it would be 'fun' to set up an Ubuntu Server VM now.
Now what?
I ran Windows Update and did the same with Defender to make sure I'm up to date on the latest patches/security definitions. So far I've tweaked Remote Desktop settings to use my Mac host and Windows App to 'remotely' connect to my Windows 11 VM.
I've also connected to my Ubuntu server from Terminal and Powershell through SSH. Most of the time this works fine, occasionally a few hiccups with IP address/connection issues.
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Learning Curve: I've had a couple of patchy issues connecting to my Windows VM from my Mac host and vice versa. Eventually I learned to set up an inbound firewall rule through Windows Defender Firewall. I allowed ICMPv4 (for ping), set the IP address to my Mac host and also disabled Stealth mode on my Mac firewall.
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Challenges: Driver issues with installing Windows 11 image - I uninstalled the UTM Guest Tools and had to adjust my Mac Accessibility settings. VMWare/Broadcom website a bit tricky to navigate.
Conclusion
Exciting to run Windows on my Mac without having to buy a new PC! Still exploring what I can do with my VMs, both the server and Windows client. I'm planning to set up a VLAN with my Ubuntu server, Mac host and Windows 11 VM.