In this article, we will show you how to deploy a virtual machine and install Windows 10/11 on it on the Proxmox Virtual Environment hypervisor.
First, you need:
- Download Windows Media Creation Tool (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10) and create a Windows installation ISO image file;
- Also, download the ISO image with KVM VirtIO drivers for Windows (https://fedorapeople.org/groups/virt/virtio-win/direct-downloads/stable-virtio/virtio-win.iso). This is a set of paravirtualized drivers for KVM/Linux that will provide better virtual device performance than the built-in emulated drivers.
Upload both iso files to the PVE storage.
Now we need to create a new Proxmox virtual machine to deploy the Windows guest.
- Open the Proxmox VE web management interface (WAC) and click the Create VM button;
- Set the VM name;
- Then go to the OS tab and select your Windows 10 install ISO that you uploaded earlier. Proxmox should automatically detect the type of OS in the image and set the type of guest OS of the virtual machine (Microsoft Windows version 10/2016/2019);
- Go to the System tab and enable the Qemu Agent option and the VirtIO SCSI disk controller type;
- Then go to the Hard Disk tab and configure the virtual machine disk settings. Bus/Device: SCSI (IDE is used by default), Storage: select the ProxMox storage where the VM virtual disk will be placed, and specify the size of the virtual disk (at least 25 GB). Here you can choose one of two types of virtual disks: raw (better performance) or qcow2 (advanced functionality and snapshots support). You can also pass a physical disk or USB flash drive into a virtual machine (Passthrough Physical Disk in Proxmox VE). Here you can enable the Write back cache option -> Discard. This will increase performance, but there are some risks of data loss;
- On the CPU and Memory tab, specify the number of virtual machine cores you want to allocate (at least 2 kvm64 core) and the amount of RAM (at least 2GB);
- Click the Network tab. Select the virtual card type VirtIO (paravirtualized) instead of Intel E1000. Disable the Firewall option if you will be using the built-in Windows Defender firewall;
- Check the settings and click Finish to create the VM;
- Once you have created a new virtual machine in Proxmox for Windows, open its settings and add another CD/DVD drive. Mount the ISO file with VirtIO drivers;
- Start the VM by clicking Start. Press the Console button to open the virtual machine console screen;
- Windows installation should start automatically;
- Windows Setup won’t be able to detect the disk of your VM. Therefore, you need to load the VirtIO controller driver. Click the Load Driver button and select your VirtIO driver disk;
- Install the Red Hat VirtIO SCSI pass-through controller driver (\w10\amd6\vioscsi.inf);
- After installing the controller driver, the Windows Setup will see your disk and you can continue with the installation;
- After finishing installing Windows 10 on a virtual machine, you need to install the VirtIO drivers for the network card and other devices. To do this, open the Windows Device Manager (
devmgmt.msc). Find unknown devices in the list. Right-click on the device, select Update Driver -> Browse my computer for driver software, and specify the path to the VirtIO driver disk. You need to install at least the following drivers: Redhat VirtIO Ethernet Adapter (\NetKVM\w10\amd64), VirtIO Balloon Driver (\Balloon\w10\amd64) For details, check the article Installing KVM VirtIO Drivers in a Windows Virtual Machine;
- After installing all drivers, install VirtIO Agent (\guest-agent\quemu-ga-x86_64.msi);
- Run the installation of virtio-win-gt-x64.msi from the ISO image. Specify drivers and services to install additionally.
This completes the setup of the Windows 10 virtual machine on Proxmox. You can continue to configure Windows settings in the guest OS (set hostname, network settings, install necessary apps, join the device to the Active Directory domain, etc.)