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Create Windows 11 Virtual Appliance using Tiny 11 with only 2GB memory

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I recently came to learn about a really cool project called Tiny 11 which is a stripped down version of Windows 11 Pro 22H2 that can run with just 2GB of memory and 8GB of storage. While you would probably not use this for production workloads, it could be interesting for those with homelabs and can even for demo purposes.

Disclaimer: Tiny 11 is not an official project from Microsoft, use at your own risk. If you are interested in creating an optimized Windows 10 or 11 image, you can also check out these VMware resources here and here to produce a similiar size image using official Microsoft tools and images.

UPDATE (02/16/23) - There is now an Arm version for Tiny 11, which is great for anyone using the ESXi-Arm Fling and the technique in this blog post would also apply.

After performing a manual installation of Tiny 11, I thought it would be neat if I could build a Virtual Appliance (OVA) for Tiny 11 and also add custom OVF properties, which would allow anyone to customize the OS further without having to rely on any external tooling.

In fact, I had demonstrated this concept back in 2019 using Windows Server 2016 in this blog post and I figure it should be easy enough to also do the same for Tiny 11 or even standard Windows 11! With a bit of trial/error, I was indeed able to create a simple Tiny 11 OVA that includes the following OVF properties as shown in the screenshot below.


My initial goal was to fully automate the building of a Tiny 11 OVA with custom OVF properties using Packer. However, after many attempts, I was not able to figure out the correct autoattended.xml configuration and decided on a semi-manual approach which is detailed in the instructions below. If anyone is able to figure out how to get Tiny 11 installed via Packer, then I may revisit this topic and automate the remainder of the setup.

Note: The instructions below are not specific to Tiny 11 in any way and is also applicable to standard Windows 10 or 11 image.

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Quick Tip - Additional NVMe vendors (SK Hynix & Sabrent) for ESXi homelab

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The Samsung 980 Pro NVMe is a pretty popular SSD model that is used by many within the VMware Homelab Community. However, in recent months, there have been an alarming amount of reports from owners that their 980 Pro NVMe devices have been failing prematurely due to firmware issues.

Samsung has finally acknowledge the problem with a firmware fix and it looks like a simliar fix is also planned for the Samsung 990 Pro NVMe.

While I can not comment on the specific issues with the Samsung 980/990 Pro NVMe devices, I have had my own failures with cheaper Samsung M.2 NVMe devices where I lost my vSAN setup since I only had a single vSAN diskgroup comprised of single cache and capacity SSD for my homelab. While not ideal, this is to be expected since I had no redundancy and consumer hardware can and will fail over time. I ended upgrading both of my SSDs to a Samsung 970 Plus, which luckily is not affected by the firmware issues.

I typically recommend Samsung, Intel and Western Digital NVMe devices as they typically just work with ESXi, especially for homelab purposes where cost is one of the factors. From some of the online posts that I have read about the current Samsung 980/990 Pro issues, it seems that many have lost faith in Samsung and some have even stated that they will no longer consider Samsung for storage purchases.

This was also a simliar sentiment when I recently spoke with a fellow VMware colleague who was also impacted by the firmware issues. As part of our discussion, he had shared a couple of alternative vendors that he has is now using and recommending for his VMware Homelab setup which also includes vSAN. I thought this was good information that could also benefit folks in the community looking for other storage options.

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ESXi on AMD ChangWang CW56-58

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It can be pretty difficult to find an AMD-based small form factor (SFF) kit that is compatible with recent ESXi releases. The large majority of these AMD SFF kits all use Realtek for their onboard network adaptor and Realtek does not have a driver for ESXi, nor have they expressed any interests in creating one.

This is also quite unfortunate, as there have been some pretty interesting AMD kits that have been released in the market, but they can not be fully utilized due to the network driver challenges. Prior to the holiday break, fellow VMware colleague Hilko Lantinga, who works in our End User Computing (EUC) division had reached out about a new AMD kit that he had just acquired and has been very happy with after putting it through its paces, especially from a power efficiency standpoint for his updated VMware Homelab.

The system is from a vendor called ChangWang, which I was not familiar with and the AMD kit is the CW56-58, which is based on an AMD Zen 3 architecture (7nm) and what stands out immediately is that this system includes four built-in network adaptors (hint: they are all compatible with latest ESXi 8.0 release)! I asked if he would be willing to sharing his thorough review with the community as this could be a really interesting system and below is Hilko's detailed write-up in his own words.


The following content below is a contribution from Hilko Lantinga.

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