Summary
Those of us who have stuck with Intel and AMD x86-based computers tend to take virtual machines for granted, but on the ARM side of the pond, it’s been an uphill battle to get VM support to the same level. Apple Silicon-powered Macs have led the way on VMs so far, but now, Windows 11 on ARM is getting some love as well.
Oracle has released the very first VirtualBox 7.2 beta, and the biggest addition here is the fact that we now have support for Windows 11 on ARM chips. This means that you can now create VMs with relative ease if your new Windows laptop happens to come with a Snapdragon CPU. This is a huge development. Before this, you didn’t really have an “easy” way to set up a VM on an ARM Windows computer. It wasn’t impossible, but it was a multi-step process that involved setting up a Hyper-V front-end and jumping through a few hoops before you ended up with something functional. With VirtualBox, it should be as simple a process as it currently is on an x86 Windows computer—create a VM inside the app, then load it up with installation files to set up the actual operating system inside that VM.
Virtualization is, for the most part, still limited to other ARM-based operating systems. you may run another instance of Windows 11, or you can run an ARM-based build of Linux. While it’s not technically impossible, emulating an x86 operating system on an ARM computer would be a really slow and painful experience, so I’m not sure that this is something many people would be interested in. Plus, if you do want to run x86 software on your ARM computer, you don’t need a VM for that. Windows 11 already has a translation layer to run x86 legacy programs on ARM computers called Prism, and while it used to be famously bad, it has improved over the past few years as ARM computers have become more powerful and common.It’s still not perfect, though.
VirtualBox already has support for Apple Silicon Macs, and it allows Mac users to run Windows 11 inside a VM. You’ll probably not be able to do it the other way around for the time being (macOS running on ARM Windows hosts), but VirtualBox already has some experience with ARM virtualization, so a version for ARM Windows computers was going to come around sooner or later.
If you want to check this out on your Snapdragon-powered laptop, you candownload the beta releasenow. Don’t expect to deploy any VMs you plan on seriously using for the time being—this is the very first beta, which means that it might, and probably does, have some major bugs here and there.
