Windows 11 Arm Setup stops on the Windows logo in a VMware Fusion VM made with vmcli

Symptoms

The machine boots the Windows 11 Arm ISO and shows the Windows logo with no spinning dots. It stays there for over five minutes. vmware-vmx uses about one core. Its log shows SMC: VPC 0x... iss 0 x0 0xc3000001 around the boot.

Evidence

The VM was made from the command line, not Fusion's New VM assistant: vmcli VM Create -n NAME -d DIR -c arm-windows11-64, then a hand-written .vmx with firmware = "efi", an NVMe disk, two SATA CD drives (the ISO and an answer-file ISO), e1000e network, USB keyboard and mouse, mks.enable3d = "TRUE", and no TPM. The answer file sets LabConfig\BypassTPMCheck and BypassSecureBootCheck in the windowsPE pass.

Tried

• 6 vCPUs, cpuid.coresPerSocket = "6", hpet0.present, svga.graphicsMemoryKB = "8388608", the GDB stub on: stopped on the logo for over five minutes.
• 4 vCPUs, without hpet0, coresPerSocket, the graphics memory line and the stub: the boot was interrupted at the firmware's boot menu, so the result is not known.
• The same, with a fully unattended answer file: the machine powered off within three minutes and started again. Why it powered off was not recorded.

Not tried yet: a VM made with Fusion's New VM assistant, which adds a TPM with partial encryption; a newer ISO (24H2 or 25H2); the en-us ISO; one CD drive only.