This is pure gold, thank you! I've been wondering what to do about my VMware machines. Some run various windows apps, and one runs Aperture, the only way to access my photo library after Apple screwed me royally by abandoning Aperture. I didn't know what ESXi was.
If you only need to run Aperture I've had good success using Retroactive[1] on my M1 Max machine running Monterrey to patch it to run under Rosetta. Almost everything works fine except anything tied to iCloud and some of the video and slideshow features. It's been great in letting me access my older photos which have adjustments that I don't want to re-create in Lightroom.
It will copy over the missing frameworks and modify the app so the OS will run it even though it's unsupported, if you're interested there is a technical breakdown that goes into detail[2].
[1] https://github.com/cormiertyshawn895/Retroactive
[2] https://medium.com/@cormiertyshawn895/deep-dive-how-does-ret...