VMWare, VirtualBox (updated)

Posted On July 31, 2024

VMWare’s 13.5.2 update dropped the support for (updated) Monterey in the VMWare Tools, based on my experience. (Probably also previous versions of OSX.)

VMWare Tools reports “wrong processor type.” I suspect that was a mistake, but since Broadcom nuked all of my VMWare accounts, I am not reporting it to them. To install VMWare Tools in Monterey or previous, you must find VMWare Tools 13.0.

In addition, Macintosh Virtual Machine support for VMWare has been deprecated by Broadcom. There is now officially no support for Macintosh VM’s.

VirtualBox

VirtualBox Guest Additions do officially support a small subset of Macintosh Guest machines. Monterey is not on the supported list as of this post’s date.

When installing Monterey in Virtualbox, you should set the number of processors to 3, and disable the sound. Once the install process is over (which takes an extremely long time), you can change those things. Apple makes it almost impossible to create install media from their downloaded installers, unless you run them on older VM’s, which satisfies the “createinstallmedia” application’s requirements in the Install macOS bundle

Since there are no “Guest Additions” for Monterey, you are stuck with 1024×768, unless you use a command line process to change the EFI Bios’ attached monitor. Once you do that, you can change your video resolution. Note that the mouse is very laggy in a VirtualBox VM, but it is usable.

You can select various resolution numbers. Here is the command for a virtual machine named “Monterey” on VirtualBox using 1600 by 1200 pixels, if you are running VirtualBox 7.0.19 or greater version:

VBoxManage setextradata “Monterey” VBoxInternal2/EfiGraphicsResolution 1600×1200

VMWare

VMWare support will now fall on the community, for the few future versions of OSX that it will work on. You can search for “download VMWare Tools 13” and probably find user provided Intel VMWare Tools downloads.

I *strongly suspect* Broadcom will jettison the single user community of VMWare users. Expect them to deprecate VMWare Workstation and VMWare Fusion in the near future. Applications like VirtualBox and Parallels will take over.

I have heard Parallels works on the Mac, so I will most likely head that direction in the future. One caveat is that Apple is making it harder and harder for VM’s to work, and will go all in on their “M” series of processors. Apple’s future depends upon how Intel reacts to this type of move. If they make their processors much more power efficient, and *much* faster in execution, then Apple will lose.

However, I suspect that Intel has lost their way. In my mind, their only way out is to provide a Dual Mode processor set than can handle ARM much faster than current ARM devices, and handle x86 at the same time. If they do this, then power consumption for desktop and workstations won’t be an issue in the near term.

If they do it at *massive* power savings, then they will reclaim the processor throne and wipe the board with their competitors. I don’t think they have it in their DNA, but I have been wrong before.

Fini

I hope this is found through your search engine and leads to some successful outcomes for you.

Enjoy!