Short version
You want to get this running as fast as possible. Do these four steps, and then check the compatibility section later in this post.
Step 1: Install Parallels Desktop
That annual license fee is worth every cent for what it unlocks. If you have a MacBook Pro with more than 32 GB of RAM, get the Pro Edition. It’s worth it.
Step 2: Install Windows 11 Arm64
When you open the Parallels Control Center and click the plus button, it says “Get Windows 11 from Microsoft”. You can configure it how you want, but that’s your choice.
Step 3: Install SQL Server 2025 Enterprise or Standard Developer edition
If your organization uses Standard edition, get the Standard Developer edition. It’s new for SQL Server 2025, and a welcome addition to the stable.
Step 4: Install SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) 22
SSMS 22 was released a week ago and it runs natively on Arm64. It even has dark mode if you’re into that.
Long version
We Apple product folks have been through a journey with the Microsoft data platform and Arm64 support, haven’t we? When the M1-based Apple silicon laptops were released, we couldn’t run Windows x64 in a virtual machine at all. Then Parallels managed to get a build of Windows 11 Arm64 going, but that meant we couldn’t run SQL Server … reliably, anyway. Some versions could install sometimes, but it was unpredictable.
For a while, we resorted to using containers, and in the beginning it wasn’t even SQL Server, it was the Azure SQL Edge container. Remember that? RIP.
Then, SQL Server on Linux containers with Rosetta 2 and Docker finally got us to a place that was mostly the same as before. The containers even ran a little faster than the 64-bit version of SQL Server on the previous Intel-based MacBooks. And you could run Azure Data Studio to access the container. Remember that? RIP.
Unfortunately, as a result of new features added to SQL Server 2025 and macOS respectively, SQL Server containers stopped working. There was a brief moment when one of the public CTP releases worked, but the release candidate didn’t. Many of us were disappointed. I say many, but I actually don’t know. Maybe it’s just ten of us.
In any case, I was very pleased when I discovered that SSMS 22 could run on Windows 11 Arm64, so I figured when I got my hands on an internal build of SQL Server 2025 GA (full disclosure: I work at Microsoft in the Data Docs team), and got it to install, I was very happy.
Compatibility issues
It’s not completely broken, but it’s still broken. There are always challenges to overcome in an unsupported and undocumented developer experience such as this. They are a small frustration for the payoff that it provides.
Disclaimer: I shouldn’t have to say this, but don’t run SQL Server on macOS in a production environment.
SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS)
You can’t restart the SQL Server instance from inside SSMS, and you will get at least two error messages. No surprise there.
SQL Server Configuration Manager
This is half-broken. You don’t see the 64-bit configuration stuff (that’s a technical term), so you can’t enable network access to your SQL Server instance from here (which you need to access it from macOS).
If your next thought is, “Fine, I’ll use PowerShell”, that doesn’t work either. You need to go into the Windows registry and turn on TCP/IP (and / or named pipes) there.
– For TCP access, set Enabled to 1 in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL17.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQLServer\SuperSocketNetLib\Tcp
– For named pipes access, set Enabled to 1 in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL17.MSSQLSERVER\MSSQLServer\SuperSocketNetLib\Np
Before restarting, don’t forget to enable mixed mode authentication for SQL Server if you plan to access the VM from macOS. Create a new SQL login with sysadmin access. The SA account should remain disabled, even in a development environment.
Now you can restart SQL Server, which you can do from SQL Server Configuration Manager as usual. While you’re there, check that the SQL Server Agent is set to start automatically, and once you’ve restarted the Database Engine, you can optionally check that the Agent service is running.
Summary
It works. It’s about as fast as a container was on the same hardware. And you get the very latest 64-bit version of SSMS for free, with all its new features.