[SOLVED] Windows 11 Enterprise with SPICE not working

[cwoelkers]

I am attempting to set up Windows 11 Enterprise 24H2, with all the latest updates, as a guest on Proxmox 8.4.11. I want Windows to make use of SPICE for USB redirection from the remote client, specifically for Yubikey usage. I have gotten Windows installed and running by following the Windows 11 best practices guide on the official wiki. I also installed the virtio drivers and guest agent, via the ISO, and spice-guest-tools software and have rebooted it a few times since then. All that said once I switch the VM Display to SPICE the system does not seem to load. I say seem to as I get no display, via noVNC which errors with "Guest has yet to initialize the display" or SPICE using Remmina which cannot connect, and the average CPU usage never gets above 0.28% with the RAM usage never going above 90MB. I have left it in this state for a few hours with no change. If I revert the Display back to Default, stop the VM, and start it again afterwards it works as expected. Screenshots of the VMs Hardware, Options, and Summary pages, in a working state, are at the end of the post.

I've searched around the Internet fairly well but cannot find anything that directly or indirectly mentions this issue nor any solutions that work. Has anyone gotten this to work?
And yes I'm aware Proxmox 9 has been released. I generally don't update until the first point release, ie 9.1, unless there is a very good security based reason to do so.

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Hardware screen, yes I still have to "eject" the ISOs and remove the extra CD drive.


Options screen


Summary screen with the CPU usage tooltip shown while the system had the SPICE display set and the VM was running.

 

[cwoelkers]

This was solved by two changes, a different SPICE client and moving the VM from one of my hypervisors to another. The different client, a freshly compiled version of virt-viewer, did the most by actually connecting when Remmina would not but the VM still gave a poor user experience. So I thought of all the newer CPU tech that Win11 uses and decided to try migrating the VM to my newest hypervisor. The original hypervisor has Opteron 6536 CPUs while the new hypervisor has EPYC 9534 CPUs. While this did not work immediately after setting the processor to host I was able to get a nice stable user experience.

So the primary issue was Remmina which while it will import virt-viewer files those created by Proxmox do not work. The secondary issue of a smooth user experience was mostly taken care of by moving the VM to the newest hypervisor, with EPYC CPUs, and setting the processor on the VM to host. This still leaves some graphical performance issues but as I do not have a dedicated GPU in my hypervisors I will have to live with them.