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And of course it can download and install various flavors of Linux as well. to meet the Windows hardware requirements.
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To run Windows 11, it does provide the expected virtual TPM 2.0 support, UEFI, Secure Boot, etc. It will even download the Windows 11 VHDX for you: Parallels goes out of its way to show Windows front-and-center, even though Microsoft barely supports this with a VHDX disk image of the latest ARM64 Windows 11 Insider Preview build. Next, you get a choice of OSes to install. As there can be a lot of confusion around what you can (ARM64) and can’t (Intel) emulate on an M1 Mac, Parallels needs to start with a screenful of information: You typically start off with a virtualization solution by creating a VM, so let’s start there. So what’s the difference? Let’s do a quick comparison. VMware then later released a tech preview for their own VMware Fusion software (free while in preview). Initially, the only option for running virtual machines on M1 Macs was Parallels Desktop, so that’s where I started. (You might think the first VM was a Windows VM, but that’s not the case, the first was a Fedora 34 Linux installation. Not surprisingly, the first thing I wanted to do on it was to run virtual machines. I have a Mac Mini with the original ARM-based M1 chip.
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Oh, and you can generate your own Windows 11 ARM64 ISOs now too, just like Parallels does. Also see this post that clarifies Microsoft’s licensing for Windows for ARM64. : Feel free to read through this post and then check out the new follow-up post that compares the latest versions of Parallels and VMware Fusion.
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