If the topic of virtualization interests you, check out some more of our posts on the subject. There are many other options available for virtualization, including the free UTM app which allows you to easily run Windows 11 on an Apple Silicon Mac for example, but there’s also paid solutions including VMWare and Parallels. Go to to find the appropriate download, listed as “Developer preview for macOS / Arm64 (M1/M2) hosts”.You can run the newest M1 Parallels and a version of Windows for ARM. For M1 and M2 Mac users, you will need the Windows 11 ARM version. I will not explain the steps to install Windows 11 VM on Parallels Desktop. If Mac is the only device that you have, then you can follow this guide to run ArcGIS Pro on Mac. Unfortunately, it specifically will not let you run a VM program like Fusion or Parallels. This article is a workaround for how to run ArcGIS Pro 2.9 on my Macbook Pro M1. As usual, VirtualBox is completely free to download and to use. The new M1 Macs actually come with a program called Rosetta 2 that does this so you can run most Intel Mac software on them. While technically in beta, anyone can get access to the developer preview beta ARM build of VirtualBox through the VirtualBox website. It does this by virtualizing hardware (that you can adjust to allocate RAM, storage capacity, etc), so the operating system itself doesn’t know that it’s not running on actual hardware. To install a new virtual machine on a Mac with Apple M chip, you need to use an ARM-based installation image with a supported operating system. VirtualBox is virtualization software that allows you to run other operating systems in containers on your Mac directly from the application, for example you can run Linux or Windows directly within VirtualBox, and without having to use dual-booting or anything else.

M1 mac windows vm