Running Notes & Domino on Apple Silicon
Daniel Nashed 26 March 2023 08:49:00
The native Mac client is supported on Apple Silicon. But specially the developers among us would like to use a Notes Design client on a Mac at least.
With Intel Macs you could run a VM with Windows 10/11 to have an officially supported environment. On a Mac with M1/M2 this becomes more a bigger challenge.
Binaries intended for Intel/AMD x64 cannot run natively on a ARM CPU. There is always emulation involved - which costs performance impact and overhead.
The following is not officially supported. And if you are just running a normal client you should always prefer the native Mac client!
Even it isn't a native ARM application, the native client is the best option today.
You could also run Nomad Web in Chorme, which works extremely fast -- It runs on Linux desktops too by the way..
Note: To find out which architecture an application is using, there is a useful & free tool--> https://apps.apple.com/de/app/silicon-info/id1542271266.
Run Domino on Linux as container
I would not try to run Domino on Linux with one of the virtualization environments I am describing below.
In case you need Domino on Linux check my previous blog post.
Windows 11 ARM edition
When running Windows on a Mac you need virtualization software as described below.
I have not tried a virtual machine running a classical Intel/AMD x64 personally.
And it would make most sense to use Windows ARM to run on your Apple Silicon Mac.
When looking into technical details of the Windows ARM implementation it's clear that you should only run Windows 11 ARM VMs.
Arm64EC - Build and port apps for native performance on Arm
This article describes the technical details of the Microsoft ARM implementation --> https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/arm/arm64ec
And it is the up to date Microsoft technology for running native ARM and Intel/AMD x64.
With this information I would not even try to install an older Windows version.
Virtualization Software
There are a couple of solutions out there, which are reported to work quite well.
This isn't a complete list. It's just what I heard this week, when asking around what is working well for others.
Parallels
Parallels (https://www.parallels.com) is the most recommended solution and is reported to work well.
But it requires a commercial license for more than 100 euro
Oracle VirtualBox
VirtualBox isn't working well as far the feedback I got.
VMware Fusion
VMware Fusion player is free for none commercial use (https://customerconnect.vmware.com/en/evalcenter?p=fusion-player-personal-13).
And from what I heard back it is working well for Apple Silicon in the current version as well.
UTM
A very interesting open source solution I ran into is UTM (https://mac.getutm.app/).
It has a broad support for different types or hardware.
And it can also create virtual machines for ARM hardware, which I use for a Windows 11 ARM VM.
This is what I used to bring up a Notes & Domino server for testing and development.
Conclusion & Recommendations
It's not a supported environment. But it runs with decent performance and stability.
I got some feedback that Java code might be problematic.
My Mac isn't my main development environment. I am using it in parallel to Windows.
And I also have a ESXi server running Windows 11. So I have multiple options in parallel.
This is a starting point and there is an official AHA idea --> https://domino-ideas.hcltechsw.com/ideas/DOMINO-I-2387
to get this type of configuration supported for development and test environments.
You can see also that emulation comes with overhead and performance impact (see the screen print from UTM above).
A native ARM VM has way better performance. But still there is emulation involved inside the Windows 11 ARM VM for Notes & Domino x64 programs.
The article from Microsoft makes clear that this is the currently best option we have.
More and more software will support ARM natively or in an hybrid mode.
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