Tips and Tricks:
The first step is to create the virtual hard disk. Open a terminal and use the qemu-img command.
For QCOW2 images on SSDs, enable the discard option to pass TRIM commands from the guest to the host. This frees up space in the QCOW2 file when files are deleted in Windows, keeping the image file size efficient: windows 81 qcow2 install
Change the Network Interface card (NIC) model type to .
virt-install \ --name Win8.1-VM \ --ram 4096 \ --vcpus 2 \ --disk path=/var/lib/libvirt/images/windows81.qcow2,bus=virtio,format=qcow2 \ --os-variant win8.1 \ --network network=default,model=virtio \ --graphics spice \ --import Use code with caution. 4. Importing into Proxmox VE (PVE) Tips and Tricks: The first step is to
Sufficient storage space (at least 20GB available on the host machine). 2. Required Files
Some cloud providers and open-source projects offer ready-to-run QCOW2 images for legal evaluation. The most official source is (Windows 8.1 VMs for browser testing). However, those are usually in VHDX or VMDK format—convertible to QCOW2. This frees up space in the QCOW2 file
After installation, start and enable the virtualization daemon: sudo systemctl enable --now libvirtd Use code with caution. Step 2: Create the QCOW2 Virtual Disk
You can configure and launch your VM using either the graphical virt-manager wrapper or raw qemu-system flags. Below are both methods to ensure compatibility with your preferred workflow. Method A: Graphical Deployment via virt-manager Open the ( virt-manager ). Click File -> New Virtual Machine .