How to run a Windows virtual machine on Incus on Linux

Heya,

Two quick notes. For troubleshooting, we have seen a number of systems where Windows, at least Windows 11 crashes as it starts booting. If that happens, setting raw.qemu to -cpu host tends to fix the issue, at the cost of a bit more CPU usage as that’s disabling some hyperv/Windows extensions.

The other thing is that we now support hosting ISO images in Incus directly.
So rather than using a disk device pointing to a .iso in your home directory, you can now do:

incus storage volume import default /path/to/iso/file win11 --type=iso
incus config device add my-vm install disk pool=default source=win11
6 Likes