VMware Fusion Pro 26H1 for macOS

VMware Fusion Pro 26H1 runs on practically any Mac you have sitting on your desk right now. It supports Apple Silicon machines and the older Intel 64-bit workhorses, as long as you're on macOS 13 (Ventura) or something newer.

Create your first virtual machine

Once you fire it up, point the built-in assistant at a Windows 11 ISO or a Linux distribution you want to try. Fusion walks you through picking a name and deciding how much RAM and disk space to hand over—you can always tweak that later. The 26H1 release even timestamps your VM creation, so you'll know exactly when you started messing with that old copy of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. If you're feeling adventurous, the new guest OS support for openSUSE 16.0, Fedora 44, and FreeBSD 15.0 gives you plenty of fresh territory to explore right out of the gate.

Connect to something bigger

Fusion isn't just a sandbox on your local drive. Try setting up a remote connection to an ARM-based ESX host—that's new in this version. Or spin up a local Kubernetes cluster directly on your Mac. It's the kind of thing that turns your machine from a simple Windows-on-Mac box into a proper little test lab, without needing a rack of noisy hardware in the corner.

Change the default VM folder so your disk doesn't fill up

Open Preferences from the VMware Fusion menu and head straight for the General tab. The default behavior dumps every virtual machine onto your Mac's internal drive, and that fills up faster than a fry basket on a Friday night. Point the default folder to an external SSD if you have one on the desk. It saves headaches later, especially when you start cloning VMs or keeping snapshots around.

Next, visit the Keyboard & Mouse tab. Three settings matter here. First, flip the shortcut for releasing the cursor to something you'll remember—I use Command-Option. Second, turn off the Mac host shortcuts passthrough unless you genuinely need Windows to intercept Command-Tab. Third, check the box that maps the Mac Command key to the Windows key only inside the VM, not globally. You'll avoid that moment where you try to quit Safari and accidentally close a server console you've been nursing for an hour.

While you're poking around, give the Display settings a look. If you're on a Retina Mac, enable the full resolution option for your Windows 10 virtual machines. DirectX 11 support is already baked in, so that crisp 3D acceleration is sitting there waiting for you to use it.

Install VMware Tools for shared folders and clipboard sharing

Day one: install VMware Tools in every guest OS you spin up. It's not glamorous, but it gets you shared folders, proper screen resizing, and clipboard sharing between Mac and VM. Without Tools, you're working with one hand tied behind your back. The install takes two minutes, and the difference is immediate—drag a file from your Mac desktop right into a Windows folder and watch it land.

Day two: make a snapshot before you change anything significant inside a VM. Installing a questionable driver? Testing a configuration tweak? Snapshot first. If things go sideways, you roll back in seconds. I learned this the hard way after a Windows registry experiment turned a perfectly good VM into a digital paperweight. Fusion's snapshot manager sits in the Virtual Machine menu, and it's worth treating like an undo button with no regrets.

Day three: explore the command-line tools for containers. Fire up Terminal and run the OCI container commands Fusion ships with. If you're already comfortable with Docker-like workflows, this feels familiar. It turns Fusion from a windowed virtualization app into something you can script and automate, which matters if you're spinning up test environments regularly.

Parallels polish versus Fusion's per-machine licensing

Parallels Desktop has been the loudest name in Mac virtualization for years. It's polished, fast, and tightly integrated with macOS. Coherence mode, where Windows apps float alongside native Mac windows, still feels more refined there. But Parallels pushes updates on a yearly cadence that can leave older macOS versions behind quicker than some folks would like.

UTM takes the opposite approach. It's free, open-source, and built around QEMU underneath. On Apple Silicon, it handles ARM-based operating systems decently. The trade-off is speed and graphics—DirectX 11 and eGPU support are not on the menu, so Windows gaming or GPU-heavy workloads won't fly. For a lightweight Linux VM that doesn't need acceleration, it gets the job done without any activation steps.

VirtualBox still exists on the Mac, barely. Oracle keeps it on life support with community builds for Apple Silicon that lag behind the Intel version. USB 3.1 passthrough works on a good day. On a bad day, you're digging through forums trying to figure out why your guest OS kernel module won't load after a macOS point update. Fusion Pro sits comfortably between all of these—more capable than UTM or VirtualBox for serious work, less aggressive about pushing you into a new version every autumn than Parallels.

Bottom line: tweak those preference panels early, make snapshots a habit, and Fusion Pro earns its keep as the quiet workhorse of Mac virtualization.

Version 26H1 brings a few practical touches and wider OS support. Here's what's new:

• Timestamps now show when a virtual machine was created and when it last powered on.
• You can connect remotely to ARM-based ESX hosts.
• Guest OS support added for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Fedora 43 and 44, SUSE Linux Enterprise 16, openSUSE 16.0, and FreeBSD 15.0.

• macOS 13 or later
• Works on both Apple Silicon and Intel 64-bit Macs
• Interface language: English