Update Windows 10 VM to Windows 11

[Afox]

Hello,

did anyone successfully update a Windows 10 VM to Windows 11? Is it possible if you just set the OS type to Windows 11/Server 2022 and add a TPM device? Any other actions required?

Thanks and best regards

 

[Afox]

Just a heads up for anyone who thinks about it:

This was my starting point: https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...ndows-11/fba31ff3-3d77-40db-9726-b1be540fb3b3

You first need to download the PC Health Check App
and then Windows 11 Installation Assistant

For being able to install Windows 11 following requirements need to be fulfilled:

• Your CPU needs to be in the supported CPU list which means you need to set the CPU type to host for your guest
• Minimum two CPU cores
• Your system disk needs to be larger than 64GB
• Your guest must have more than 4GB RAM
• You need to add a TPM 2.0 state to your guest
• Your guest must support Secure Boot meaning you need to set OVMF (UEFI) as BIOS setting and add an EFI Disk with pre-enrolled keys

 

[proximatecause]

Hello,

did anyone successfully update a Windows 10 VM to Windows 11? Is it possible if you just set the OS type to Windows 11/Server 2022 and add a TPM device? Any other actions required?

Thanks and best regards

I did it recently!

If you don't already have one, you need to also create an EFI disk. After I added the TPM and EFI disk, I ran health check to confirm it was recognized and then went through the Windows 11 upgrade process. I cloned my VM before the upgrade just in case. Be prepared to start over and rely on your clone/backup if you need to. I didn't document it, but I had some issues with getting it to boot in OVMF after the switch from SEABIOS.

I had some complications - this all started p2v (migrated a physical workstation to proxmox) and the workstation has migrated from Vista -> 7 -> 10 before it got to Proxmox, with all of the built up problems you can imagine. I got it working initially using the old SSD in SATA pass-through mode before using clonezilla to copy the disk over to my lvm. The first time I got it upgraded to 11 and re-launched, none of my old software would load (which was the only reason I kept this install around), so I wiped it and started over from my clone, which worked the second time around.

I still haven't been able to convert the disk over to SCSI from IDE which is a bummer performance wise but works fine for my purposes.

 

[proxmox-h]

Note: To let windows 10 recignize your vTPM you need to provide sufficient memory. With 4096MB, the TPM module was not found in win 10. Increasing the memory to 6GB solved the problem.

 

[Lonnie]

I've upgraded Window 10 to 11 on several physical machines, and in even in Virtual Machine Manager successfully, but so far I haven't been able to accomplish it in Proxmox.

I have Windows 10 VM still on MBR. These commands convert MBR to GPT (which is needed for UEFI):

mbr2gpt /validate /disk:0 /allowfullos
mbr2gpt /convert /disk:0 /allowfullos

mbr2gpt shirks the partition to make room for a EFI partition of the same disk.

After shutdown, this new GPT partition won't boot until you enable the UEFI bios in Proxmox. Which automatically enables secure boot, but I have to reset the Secure Boot keys before I can boot.

Promox warns that I need to add an EFI partition when I enable UEFI, but mbr2gpt created an EFI partition when I converted MBR to GPT. So, it isn't clear to me whether I need to add another EFI in Proxmox or not. I've tried upgrading to Windows 11 with and without Promox-added-EFI.

Also, I upgraded the VM's ram from 4GB to 8GB, and switch machine-type to q95 and added TPM 2.0

I've tried every combination of doing these things above that I can think of, and each time the Window 11 upgrade fails with this error:


[ 0xC1900101 - 0x20017 The installation failed in the SAFE_OS phase with an error during BOOT operation ]

I can't think of a way around this.

UPDATE:

I migrated this Windows 10 virtual machine to a newer node in my cluster and it upgraded fine. It could be that the particular node I was trying to upgrade this on had an processor too old to properly emulate something that Window 11 was needing. I'm not sure.

One way to discover the exact settings needed, when upgrading Window 10 to 11, is to do a clean installation of Windows 11 first (in a new VM) as a means of discovering the exact settings that work.

These were my final hardware setting for the successful upgrade:




Notice that I didn't have to add a separate EFI drive like Proxmox warns about when setting the bios to UEFI, because an EFI partition was already created (on the existing virtual hard drive) when I convert the existing drive from MBR to GPT (as shown earlier).

Anyway, I hope this helps someone.