Creating a Windows-11 Virtual Machine on ESXi

hi welcome to the latest video well this is going to be another entry in my series on virtualization using vmware esxi actually version 7 that i already have loaded on my test bench sitting right over here i'm going to install windows 11 in this episode now windows 11 has a couple of tricks to it and just installing windows in general has a couple of things you have to be aware of so i'm going to make sure i cover all of that as i'm showing you how to install it the biggest trick that you have to be aware of is it doesn't recognize that there is a cpu-based tpm or a firmware-based tpm on this particular system that i have even though it's 8th generation intel definitely has it built on and if i run windows 10 or 11 as a separate standalone operating system it works just fine it installs just fine but for this one we're going to have to make what i would refer to to be honest with you as a hack sort of a back door into the windows 11 operating system that obviously was put in there by windows so that they could quickly do some testing of it and different machines of different types and get past the idea that it was looking for that little tpm module whether it's a separate standalone module or the one that's firmware based and actually uses part of the cpu so anyway i'll show you how to put this little hack in and we'll see how it works and then i'll show you some other little configuration things that have to go along with this so let's get started to install windows on any system whether it's a fixed system or a virtual machine system like esxi the first thing to do is get the actual iso file which represents the base operating system if you go to this site here which i'll put in a link below microsoft.com software download you will see where you can get everything from windows 7 through windows 11 all the released versions of it so let's say let's get windows 11. now as you can see here we have a version that i guess it's the last download version it doesn't actually have a sub version to it but this is since it came to this site this has to be the latest version of it now you get to create an installation assistant which we're not going to install on this computer or create an 11 installation media or the last one a windows 11 disk image which is what we want so let's say we want to click this we've got to pick windows 11 multi edition and then we're going to want to say you can read that little note here if you want before you download it but we want to download and the first thing it's asking us is pick our language so i'm going to pick english happens to be the language the country i'm in the united states i'm going to confirm that i want to 64-bit download so i'm going to click up here and now as you can see up in the right hand corner here it is actually downloading this is going to take a while to actually download onto this system into this browser's download directory once it's there i will put it in a safe location and then i will have it available to upload for purposes of creating a virtual machine from it okay i'm inside of the actual esxi management screen so i'm logged into it remotely from the pc i'm doing this video on and as you can see from this i have a windows 10 virtual machine already installed i did that during my live stream not too long ago so let's see if we can get that actual iso file over here now i have two storage locations one is an ssd this one is the hard drive that i have a 500 gig hard drive western digital this one here is the actual one where i actually store the created virtual machines and that's on the ssd that's a 480 gigabyte ssd the first thing we have to do is upload the image to this particular storage location this vm store location that i've created so i click on data browser i want to go into the iso files right now all i have out there is the windows iso which is the windows 10 the name is a little misleading on that it should say 10 but it didn't so let's go ahead and upload the new one a new one i have loaded over in my area where i store these things and right here i have windows 11 english this is the one that we downloaded a few seconds ago so i'm going to now upload it to that data store within esxi so i'll do it open it's fast here so let me just do a refresh and see if it's there and it is there so it's already completed and i have the new windows 11 iso file out there both of these are iso files right let's close this now let's create the new virtual machine so if i go into virtual machines here on the left hand side i can say create a vm and then this screen is opened up which allows us to actually create the vm on this esxi vmware machine so the first thing it wants is do i want to create a new virtual machine what do i want to display or do i want to register an existing virtual machine let's say i transfer that over from another instance of esxi well that's not the case here i want to create a new one so i'll click on that and i'll hit next now i have to give it a name so what i'm going to call it is win11 and i'm just going to say a in case i make a b c d whatever i also have to go select what is its os family it happens to be in the family of windows and i have to create the version of it now this does not have the windows 11 yet maybe in a future version of esxi it will it has windows 7 windows 8 all sorts of things windows server 2003 and on and on there's a whole bunch to choose from the closest one to what i'm doing happens to be windows 10 64-bit so that's what i'll select i am not enabling this option here that's a special case one you can read about by clicking on that little information tab but we'll just proceed next it's going to put it in the data store one which is my ssd and that's exactly where i want it i don't want to put it in the vm store which is where i put the iso files so i'll just go ahead and hit next now i've got to set the options for this particular virtual machine if you click on any one of these you get further sub options to them so under cpu you got number of cpus you got number of cores per socket i'm going to take those defaults on it since windows 10 is what that defaulted to and that's usually pretty close i can reserve certain amounts of frequency associated with it i'm not going to do any reservations for this particular one i will take the defaults and now the next one i want is memory now it's going to start off with four gig of memory that's good but i want to reserve another four so i'm going to select reservation of 8 gig total of memory so that's all i have to change on this one under hard disk well 48 is not enough for windows 11 so i'm going to bump that up to 64. i also want to go to thin provisioning if this was a vm that i'd be running full-time for uh purposes of something that is critical to me i would use thick provisioning but it's going to take a long time to actually format that which you know i'd rather not do right now all the rest i can take the default options but what i don't have is i need to attach the iso file to this cd dvd drive and i do that by clicking here and then clicking a data iso file so now it wants to know how to get to it and as i said before i put those all in this storage area called vm store and under iso files and here it is so that's the one that it'll do windows 11 english and i'll select that and as you can see we're all connected to this iso file at this point the video card i won't play with that now but a future one that i use for doing my rendering i may for a windows 11 when i'm using that to render my videos but now let me go back up and i want to pick vm options let's look at boot options now it's defaulting to efi now that's critical for windows 11. it has to have efi bios you do have an option of going to a regular default older generation bios which would work fine with windows 10 but it won't work with windows 11. but what i do have to do and this is something that i'll show as i get to configure the windows 11 i have to give it a nice long delay and this is milliseconds so i'm going to put 10 000 milliseconds a millisecond is one thousandth of a second so this will be a 10 second boot delay now i could turn this off later once we've installed it but for purposes of installing it i need to have this delay that takes care of what we have to do here i don't want that accidentally checked it and i'll hit next now it's giving me a summary page of all the things that it will do and then you should go through this and make sure that it's everything that you selected in my particular case it looks like it is it's got the right iso file here it doesn't have the secondary screen where i put in the vm options these are the basic options for creating it however so now i will say finish and now as you can see we have windows 11a as a new virtual machine the next step will be to bring it up and start configuring it properly but to bring it up is the first trick that i have to show you okay let's see if we can get this image started and get ready to install on it i'm going to start it up but you remember i had a 10 second delay before it actually starts and i did it intentionally so that i can inject an escape key to a prompt that comes up as soon as you boot up for the first time from the installation media which is effectively what we're doing here so hopefully i'm able to get it done within the 10 seconds if not i'll have to try it again so what i'll do is i'll hit start and then i'll come over here to actions i'm going to go to guest os i'm going to go to send keys and i'm going to hit escape and it worked so right now we were able to hit the key the keyboard would not have worked this is the only way you could inject the response to that which is why i put the 10 second delay so now we can start installing it but i'm going to stop the install early on so let's go accept that i'm going to say install now i'm going to say i don't have a product key now before i do this part i'm going to have to modify the registry of the in memory image of this particular installation now what i could do is hit next at this point it'll get the error saying it cannot load windows 11 on this pc because it won't see the tpm it can't see it through the esxi operating system unfortunately so what i'm going to do is i'm going to break out of this right now so i come in here and i hit shift f10 i break into a command prompt on this image that's running in memory now i'm going to make some changes to the registry so in order to do that i've got to run the reg edit usually very dangerous thing to do but we're just making a temporary change here just so we can get past the error that is about to happen hit enter now once i'm in here i've got to negotiate down to this one h key local machine and once i'm in h key local machine i then go to system and when i'm on system i have to right click on the setup so this one down here that says setup i gotta right click on that and i am going to say new key and i got to give it a name and the name that i have to give this key is called lab config it has to be spelled exactly that way with the particular letters capitalized as they are so now we got that key create created currently there's only one key that automatically defaulted to it but i'm going to right click in this white field and i'm going to say new g-word 32-bit and i've got to give this guy the label that says bypass tpm check and it has to be spelled exactly that way with the lead characters for each word and in case of tpm the entire acronym capitalized now it's currently set to zero so what i have to do is i have to double click on this you can see it's zero here i'm going to change it to a one and i'm going to say okay so now we have a one set into that new key that we created i can now exit out of this because it saves it in memory and if i exit out of this i should be able to proceed so let's see what happens here and there we go we would not have seen this screen if that did not work now for purposes of understanding where this came from it actually came from uh microsoft development team originally there's an article written from called ivo behrens and i've put the link down to it in the notes below so you'll be able to see the actual article that i drew this all from and it's very popular and as i said earlier this is what you would have to do no matter where you were trying to install windows 11 and the machine did not have either physically a tpm or a firmware tpm or an extra layer of operating system in this case esxi that this particular machine has so let's proceed i'm going to do an accept and then i'll do next i always do custom install and i recommend that and now the whole 64 gigabytes of space that i had allocated for the the image disk for this vm is available and i'm just going to click next and it's now installing windows 11 onto this particular pc we just have to wait a few minutes okay just continuing the prompts qs yes i don't want to add a second keyboard okay i'll call it a name similar to what i gave before win 11 a okay i want to set it up for personal use now i don't want to sign into the microsoft account so what i'll do here and i don't want to create one i don't have a security key i'm going to go to sign in options and one of the options which i will choose is called the offline account this is because i picked windows pro windows 11 pro if i had picked windows 11 home it would have forced me to use the microsoft account i'll skip this for now it wants to know who is going to use it and i'll just give it my normal root login i've got to answer the three prompts i now should be creating that account as an administrator account i'm going to say no to all of this stuff and we'll accept that and there we go windows 11 is up but we're not done we got one more thing to do for example let me demonstrate something if i try to take this window and i try to grow it it really does not grow in either one of the dimensions it needs special drivers added along with some special services too to make it work properly as an image a vm image running in vmware now to do that i'm going to close this out i'm going to do a shutdown under action i'll say i'll just do it normally here i'll come in here go into the normal shutdown right here for windows 11 and i'll do it normal shutdown okay it is now shut down now you see this blue warning here vmware tools are not installed there's a special set of tools that have to now be installed within windows 11 itself same thing for just about any image most images that are available to be created as vms in vmware have to have those tools added so what i'm going to do is here the tools right over here i'm going to say actions guest os i'm going to say install vmware tools it will install a program that has to then be installed when i boot it up next i'll show you so now it's modified the vm is what it actually has done so now if i start it again it's actually starting up i just have to click on it to get it big so it's already starting after i did that so it's modified it and now we gotta do a login to this as root so you really shouldn't create many more accounts on this until you get the vmware tools installed but let's log in and we're up now it's pending an install now sometimes it'll prompt you right off the bat with the auto start sometimes it won't what i do is i'll open up this little file explorer and look what it's done it's added a vmware itself within a vmware and it's called vmware tools and it looks like a dvd drive so i will click on that and then i will hit setup now these tools do a lot of things it allows for proper shutdowns of the vms if you shut down the entire vmware esxi it allows for proper restart of it it allows for a lot of different things that are critical for the proper use of a vmware i did double click on that i guess i didn't i want to install it and it's just like installing any other program into your system i'm going to do a complete though i'm going to say do a complete install it also puts the proper drivers for the network for the video and so forth it does a lot of different services i'll put the link down below to the actual user manual for the vm tools so you can actually get a view of what it does and and basically how it functions okay they are now installed it says i must restart so i will say go ahead and restart there we go so now i can resize this any way i want it's obedient to the resizing because the drivers are proper for vmware and of course you know log in and make sure you get the latest security patches installed i won't go through that in this video i think at this point i've covered what i need to cover and hopefully we got something out of it and i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: PE4Doers

Views: 8,153

Keywords: VMWare7, VMWare 7, Installing Windows 11 without a TPM, Windows 11 Issues, Virtual Machines

Id: jpVZtPfzu5c

Length: 17min 54sec (1074 seconds)

Published: Wed May 18 2022