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