Hey everyone! I think I have a breakthrough.

So who blinks first? Microsoft to release publicly the ISO for Windows 11 ARM, or VMware to provide a similar ISO for download like Parallels does? So, if you have this Windows 11 ARM ISO that Parallels downloaded for you, the installation of a Fusion Windows 11 ARM VM just got a little easier. So far the VM is behaving fine and updating itself to the 2023-02 Cumulative Update for Windows 11 for arm64-based Systems. No issues with the ISO and no changes to the procedures in the Companion Guide. I skipped the procedures in the Companion Guide for building an ISO from and jumped straight to the procedure to create a VM and install from ISO. The ISO appears to be a pretty vanilla version of Windows 11 22H2 (build 22621.525). So I asked myself: 'Self, I wonder if this ISO will work with Fusion?' Parallels tech notes say that they are downloading the file 'from Microsoft'.

The first thing that it did was to download a Windows 11 ARM installation ISO file named:Ģ_release_svc_refresh_CLIENTCONSUMER_RET_A64FRE_en-us.iso After installation I proceeded to have it install a Windows 11 VM. I installed the trial version of Parallels Desktop 18 as I was curious what build of Windows 11 they were using. I ran a little experiment after seeing what Microsoft and Parallels announced this week.

Win 11iso