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Quick Tip - Workaround for unsupported processor error in Windows 11 for Arm on VMware Fusion

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This morning I came across an intriguing post on the VMware Reddit channel where a user had ran into an issue while attempting to upgrade their Windows 11 on Arm VM, running VMware Fusion on an Apple Silicon system. The error message stated that the CPU processor is not currently supported for Windows as you can see from the screenshot below:

After sharing the thread internally, I immediately got an answer back from one of the VMware Fusion Engineers and this issue looks to have also recently impacted UTM and luckily, there was an easy solution using the following Windows registry hack:

  • Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsSelfHost\Applicability : BranchName -> CanaryChannel
  • Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsSelfHost\UI\Selection : UIBranch -> CanaryChannel

After applying the registry tweak, the VMware Fusion Engineer confirmed Windows Update was now able to successfully start as shared with their screenshot below.

Quick Tip - Microsoft Windows 11 Eval Images for VMware Hypervisors

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If you are interested in evaluating Microsoft Windows 11, in addition to the ISO image, you can now download a pre-configured Windows 11 image (OVF) that can run on any VMware Desktop Hypervisor (Workstation, Player and Fusion) for 90 days!


Per the documentation, the pre-built image includes the following:

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Create Windows 11 Virtual Appliance using Tiny 11 with only 2GB memory

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I recently came to learn about a really cool project called Tiny 11 which is a stripped down version of Windows 11 Pro 22H2 that can run with just 2GB of memory and 8GB of storage. While you would probably not use this for production workloads, it could be interesting for those with homelabs and can even for demo purposes.

Disclaimer: Tiny 11 is not an official project from Microsoft, use at your own risk. If you are interested in creating an optimized Windows 10 or 11 image, you can also check out these VMware resources here and here to produce a similiar size image using official Microsoft tools and images.

UPDATE (02/16/23) - There is now an Arm version for Tiny 11, which is great for anyone using the ESXi-Arm Fling and the technique in this blog post would also apply.

After performing a manual installation of Tiny 11, I thought it would be neat if I could build a Virtual Appliance (OVA) for Tiny 11 and also add custom OVF properties, which would allow anyone to customize the OS further without having to rely on any external tooling.

In fact, I had demonstrated this concept back in 2019 using Windows Server 2016 in this blog post and I figure it should be easy enough to also do the same for Tiny 11 or even standard Windows 11! With a bit of trial/error, I was indeed able to create a simple Tiny 11 OVA that includes the following OVF properties as shown in the screenshot below.


My initial goal was to fully automate the building of a Tiny 11 OVA with custom OVF properties using Packer. However, after many attempts, I was not able to figure out the correct autoattended.xml configuration and decided on a semi-manual approach which is detailed in the instructions below. If anyone is able to figure out how to get Tiny 11 installed via Packer, then I may revisit this topic and automate the remainder of the setup.

Note: The instructions below are not specific to Tiny 11 in any way and is also applicable to standard Windows 10 or 11 image.

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