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Windows as QEMU guest
UPDATE: you can read the full article for free here:
https://matteocroce.it/blog/windows_qemu/
Windows can run fine under QEMU and KVM, but since installing it with QEMU or libvirt directly is not very straightforward, most people prefer using other hypervisors which have a fancy GUI.
KVM is known to have the best performance as Linux host, and require no external drivers, and with virt-manager it’s not more difficult to setup than other solutions.
A proper Windows installation, with VirtIO drivers and guest tools, will run stable and perform almost as a physical machine.
This is how the system appears:
Get the software
Assuming that your Linux distribution has qemu, libvirt and virt-manager already installed, to proceed download the following:
- VirtIO drivers: get the “Stable virtio-win iso” from
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/creating-windows-virtual-machines-using-virtio-drivers/#virtio-win-direct-downloads - Official Windows ISO install, get the latest from
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO
Put both the ISO in a libvirt pool directory, like /var/lib/libvirt/images/
