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You are here: Home / ESXi / Quick Tip - Microsoft Windows 11 Eval Images for VMware Hypervisors

Quick Tip - Microsoft Windows 11 Eval Images for VMware Hypervisors

10.31.2023 by William Lam // 1 Comment

If you are interested in evaluating Microsoft Windows 11, in addition to the ISO image, you can now download a pre-configured Windows 11 image (OVF) that can run on any VMware Desktop Hypervisor (Workstation, Player and Fusion) for 90 days!


Per the documentation, the pre-built image includes the following:

  • Windows 11 Enterprise (Evaluation)
  • Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition with UWP, .NET Desktop, Azure, and Windows App SDK for C# workloads enabled
  • Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 enabled with Ubuntu installed
  • Windows Terminal installed
  • Developer mode enabled

For those interested in using the Windows 11 image on ESXi, an additional step is needed to convert the VMDK so that it can run on ESXi. You can manually upload the VMDK and then use vmkfstools to convert.

If you have VMware Workstation or Fusion Pro, you can simply connect to an ESXi or vCenter Server endpoint (File->Connect to Server) and just "copy" the VM to the destination and that will automatically handle the conversion for you.


Once the transfer has completed, you can now run the pre-configured Windows 11 image using ESXi!


Note: Windows 11 does require vTPM (physical TPM is not needed). If you do not have vCenter Server, take a look at this blog post on how to setup vTPM on a standalone ESXi host.

For those running VMware Fusion on Apple Silicon or ESXi-Arm, per the FAQ, it does not look like Microsoft has any short term plans to provide a pre-configured Windows 11 Arm VM image for evaluation! 🙁

Unfortunately, we don't have an ARM version available at the moment. We understand that this may be disappointing news, but we don't have any short term plans to create these

More from my site

  • Quick Tip - Workaround for unsupported processor error in Windows 11 for Arm on VMware Fusion
  • How to deploy the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 8.0 to VMware Fusion or Workstation?
  • Workarounds for deploying PhotonOS 2.0 on vSphere, Fusion & Workstation
  • Tip from Engineering - Use UEFI firmware for Windows 10 & Server 2016
  • How to deploy the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) 6.5 running on VMware Fusion & Workstation?

Categories // ESXi, Fusion, Workstation Tags // fusion, player, windows 10, windows 11, workstation

Comments

  1. *protectedSteve says

    11/01/2023 at 4:07 am

    It is possible to have Windows 11 to bypass the TPM check: https://pupuweb.com/solved-fix-run-windows11-esx-error/

    Reply

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William is Distinguished Platform Engineering Architect in the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) Division at Broadcom. His primary focus is helping customers and partners build, run and operate a modern Private Cloud using the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform.

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