I successfully tested the Windows 11 Insider Preview on VMware Fusion for Mac, and it works. And the VMware Tools work too. Although VMware is not officially supporting it yet, so far it works just fine. Here’s how.
Started with Windows 10 in a VM
Since I do a lot of testing and development on various OSes and apps, I have an up to date base install of Windows 10 ready to go at all times in a Virtual Machine (VM). The Windows Insider program is enabled on a Windows machine, so you’ll need to start with Windows 10.
Not Officially Supported
When brand new OSes are released in betas, it is normal that VMware and Parallels don’t say too much about them, and do not officially support running them as a guest OS in a VM, and especially not as a host OS. However, it’s also pretty normal in my experience that running beta OSes as a guest in a VM works fine. For the host OS, I strongly recommend against running a beta or any unsupported OS as the host. And that’s really unnecessary anyway, because you can safely run just about any OS in a VM.
Enable Windows Insider and Install
There is tons out there on how to join the Windows Insider program, enable the Dev channel on Windows 10, download and install Windows 11.
You can find a ton of stuff on this by doing a Google search for “how to install windows 11 insider preview” so I’m not going to duplicate all that again here. I found How to download and install Windows 11 right now on TechRadar to be pretty good and with lots of screen shots.
Learn More
- VMware Fusion product page.
- Microsoft’s Windows Insider.
- Google search for “how to install windows 11 insider preview”.
- How to download and install Windows 11 right now on TechRadar.