VMware Workstation Pro and Fusion Pro products work by using special functions in modern 64-bit x86-64 CPUs and Apple silicon SoCs to create fully isolated, secure virtual machines that encapsulate an operating system and its applications.  Each virtual machine “thinks” and operates as if they are housed in a physical computer with dedicated physical resources. The VMware virtualization layer maps available physical hardware resources to a virtual machine’s ‘virtual’ resources, so each virtual machine has isolated and configurable access to its own CPU, memory, disks, and I/O devices.