This procedure has been tested in Arch Linux. Other distributions may have slightly different package requirements or naming conventions.

Required packages

• swtpm — provides TPM 2.0
• edk2-ovmf — provides EFI/Secureboot filesystem image

ISO images needed

• Windows 11 installation disk
• VirtIO driver disk

Extract Windows OEM product key from host system

If the system was shipped with a pre-installed Windows OS, it has the Windows licencing information in BIOS

$ sudo strings /sys/firmware/acpi/tables/MSDM
MSDMU
TLENOVOTP-N32  p
PTEC
AAAA1-AAAAA-AAAA1-1A1AA-11AA1 ← not my real product key

The last line is the product key

Create a new VM

4 GB of RAM and 2 vCPUs are the minumum requirements for Windows 11

Windows 11 requires a minimum of 64 GB of disk space

Make sure you check the box “Customize configuration before install” and hit “Finish”

Change the “Firmware” setup to UEFI x86_64: /usr/share/edk2-ovmf/x64/OVMF_CODE_secboot.fd

You can now hit “Begin Installation” and proceed with the Windows 11 installation and initial setup

Install Windows 11

OS installation

Make sure you select the same OS edition as the one for which you have an OEM licence (e.g.: Windows 11 Professional).

Initial setup

If you don't want to enrol a Microsoft Live account, answer that you want to use a Work or Active Directory account (Windows 11 Professional and up): this will take you to the local account creation screens.

Paravirtualized drivers

VirtIO drivers provide better performance and should be used when possible. The Spice video drivers also allow for seamless mouse cursor movement, dynamic resolution changes as well as drag-and-drop operations from Gnome to the Windows desktop (one way only)

VirtIO drivers installation

• mount the VirtIO driver/guest agent ISO
• install the drivers and guest agent

Change system disk (SATA→VirtIO)

The default system disk is created as a SATA drive. Changing it to VirtIO immediately will not work because Windows has to load the VirtIO disk drivers at least once before it is able to boot from a VirtIO system disk. We need to created dummy VirtIO disk first.

• shut down the VM
• add a 1GB VirtIO hard disk
• power on the VM and let the OS load completely
• sign in and check that Disk Manager sees an extra disk (you don't need to initialise it)
• shut down the VM
• delete the 1GB VirtIO drive
• change the system disk type from SATA to VirtIO — you need to edit the XML file to perform this operation (either through virsh or from the virt-manager GUI, after having enabled XML file edition)

Initial disk configuration:

<disk type="file" device="disk">
  <driver name="qemu" type="qcow2"/>
  <source file="/var/lib/libvirt/images/Windows11.qcow2"/>
  <target dev="sda" bus="sata"/>
</disk>

Modified disk configuration:

<disk type="file" device="disk">
  <driver name="qemu" type="qcow2"/>
  <source file="/var/lib/libvirt/images/Windows11.qcow2"/>
  <target dev="vda" bus="virtio"/>
  <address type="pci" domain="0x0000" bus="0x05" slot="0x00" function="0x0"/>
</disk>

Other devices

Now that the VirtIO drivers have been installed in Windows, you can change the NIC type from Intel e1000e to VirtIO via the virt-manager GUI

Activate Windows

Use the product key extracted from BIOS information (see above)

You can now proceed witht he system updates and start using the Windows VM.

— Kicou