Freedom From Parallels

An expensive, limited Mac hypervisor can be discarded.

Today I took a short break from chipping away at the salt in the depths of the PHP mine to fantasize about having a new Mac. I don’t really NEED a new Mac, Pinky and Brain are doing just fine, but I was weary of looking at the evil mix of declarative programming language and HTML tags …

I guess I was thinking I’d do more virtualization, and I started Googling, and to my astonishment there is a workable replacement for the consolation prize hypervisor known as Parallels …

Attention Conservation Notice:

Apple silicon Mac owners might find some use in this. You can do a more complete home lab with VMWare Fusion Pro than you can with Parallels.

Fusion Event:

I periodically check to see if VirtualBox for Apple silicon has made any progress. Might as well be a nineties kid waiting for Duke Nukem Forever. I think I just figured out why this is the case though … VMware Fusion Pro is now free for personal use.

Free, that is, if you can find the damned thing and actually get it downloaded.

You are going to have to make a login on Broadcom’s website. Get ready for a time machine trip back to the turn of the century.

If you use one of the big public email services it will complain that you’re not using a company email … as you try to download the free for personal use software(!)

The janky web site isn’t just janky in one spot, an extensive effort to make it equally janky across the board has been made.

If you are patient and persistent you will come to have this file in your possession.

VMware-Fusion-13.6.3-24585314_universal.dmg

Once you’ve got it, the turn of the century web site experience fades. This is a modern piece of software that installs smoothly.

Virtualizing:

Once you’ve got it, you can do things like this.

I’m not about Windows 11 under the best of circumstances, but it’s nice to have it corralled in an environment where you can watch it do network stuff. This is something you can do with Fusion Pro, that you might be able to do with Parallels Pro. I bought plain Parallels for $99, learned I needed the $119 Pro, and was low key furious to find that I had to just throw away the first one and pony up another $119. Heck those guys.

And after much dicking around with Windows 11, no I am not opening my life to you, Microsoft. I simply shut it down and manually expunged it from the command line.

Ubuntu, on the other hand, is not an invasive piece of shit …

Network Functions:

Here’s the stuff you can’t get with the $99 Parallels. This lets you do things like have internet access via a NAT network, have bridged access to your local ethernet, so all machines in your home/office can reach it, or have a network internal to your computer that your virtual machines share.

Things are not quite where I left them in VirtualBox, so I am still at the cursing/Googling phase of things, but it runs smoothly, VMs feel nice and fast, and Parallels has been ejected forever more.

Conclusion:

DeskNet from three weeks ago is still extant, it’s just packed for moving, except for my main machine. It’ll get put right back as soon as I unpack. I’m still running Sapper Labs Cloak for a lot of stuff, that will remain in use. I have some wireless troubleshooting to do and that will require DeskNet to be reassembled promptly.

The only change here is Parallels gone from Brain and one Linux VM getting replaced. When I get a minute free Pinky will get a similar Linux VM - I had just been going without, it’s really nice to have a mobile solution again.

The Windows 11 machine I got a couple months ago is going to get boosted to 64GB. I think I will pull the original NVMe drive so I have it, but then that machine gets either the Qubes bare metal single user hypervisor, or the Proxmox cloud environment.

One of the things I did this last week might morph into my being in the position to get some new hardware. As I said at the start, I don’t NEED anything, but I did just find the Scraptop today when I was packing. I wonder if that nice 17” LCD could be fitted to a machine with an eight core Xeon 2286M. That would be the perfect thing for Qubes use …

But until move is done, this is what I’m left with and it’s just fine.