Windows¶

VM Hardware Settings¶

N/A

Install Guest-Agent¶

Download the latest stable virtio-win-X.X.XXX.iso. Download at Proxmox VirtIO Drives

Mount the ISO.

Navigate to the mounted ISO directory and execute virtio-win-gt-x64.msi.

Go through the setup wizard installing all features.

In the same mounted directory, execute the virtio-win-guest-tools.exe and go through the setup wizard.

Remove VMWare Tools¶

In Windows, you will need to completely uninstall VMware Tools to get rid of the warning message upon each bootup stating that VMware Tools in unable to start. Rather than uninstalling, you can also break the VMware Tools process by navigating to C: > Program Files > VMware > VMware Tools and renaming the vmtoolsd.exe to something like vmtoolsd_bak.exe.

Configure Network Interfaces¶

On Proxmox, in Windows, upon first boot, you need to go to Device Manager, select View Hidden Devices, and select “uninstall device” for the “vmxnet3 Ethernet Adapter” or whichever ethernet adapter you used in your VMware vSphere configuration. Then proceed by uninstalling the “Red Hat VirtIO Ethernet Adapter” Reboot the VM to allow Windows to correctly assign the network adapter.

Optimizing Disks¶

Run Disk Cleanup¶

Launch the Disk Cleanup utility and remove all unnecessary files.

Defrag/Trim the Disk & Turn Off Scheduled Optimization¶

Run the natively installed defrag/optimize drive utility.

Analyze the disk(s).

Choose to defrag/optimize the disk(s)

Once finished, turn off scheduled optimization.

Cleanup Slack Space¶

sDelete -z will cause the guest OS to use up 100% of the available space disk during this process while zeroing free space. This will lead to a temporary increase in used space on the datastore.

Launch a terminal with administrator privileges.

Run the SDelete command.

You need to have Sysinternals installed on the system.

sdelete.exe -z drive_letter:   

Note

As suggested by a customer, sysinternals does not have to be fully installed on every Windows machine, you can just install SDelete. You can also edit the virtio ISO you download and add this executable to it so you don’t have to install either.

Note

Replace drive_letter: with the target disk or partition. Note that when you have multiple partitions on a single virtual disk, you need to do this on all partitions for it to be effective. Otherwise, reclamation will only be partial because not every data block will be zeroed.