Win11 VMs stuck on 22h2

[eab]

Our nodes have the Intel E5-2670, and we have several Win11 22h2 VMS running.
In October this year Win11 22h2 reached EOL, and these Win11 VMs refuse to update to 23h2 or 24h2.

Initially I thought that this was due to the CPU type ('host' or 'kvm64') not being supported by Win11, but then I installed a fresh Win11 24h42 on a new VM and it worked without a hitch. I noticed that PVE automatically selects 'x86-64-v2-AES' as the CPU type for a Win11 VM, so I set one of the 22h2 VMs to that same CPU type, rebooted, double-checked that the right CPU was in the Device Manager, but still no dice - Windows Updates won't budge.

This got me thinking that maybe there is something "locked" in Windows Update that ignores the CPU change.
Does anyone have any insight into this?

 

[fireon]

The topic is already being discussed here: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/cannot-update-windows-11-to-24h2-cpu-not-supported.157850/

 

[eab]

I saw that thread, but it wasn't the same in our case because we have the problem already since 22h2.
In any case, the "solution" (/etc/pve/virtual-guest/cpu-models.conf) doesn't work.

In the meantime I found another solution - that actually works for me:

1. make sure the VM is using the 'x86-64-v2-AES' CPU type
2. use this file to update from 22h2 to 23h2
3. install all available updates - this will take you to the latest state of 23h2
4. download and install this file, and run the PC Health Check
5. download and run this file to upgrade to 24h2 (this upgrade will require 10GB of free space to do the actual installation - so ~18 GB free from the start should be safe)

Done!