Windows 10.qcow2 Direct

Unlike raw disk images ( .img or .raw ), the QCOW2 format offers advanced storage management features:

(official-ish)

Windows 10, when virtualized, benefits greatly from Qcow2 due to reduced storage overhead and flexible snapshot capabilities. Windows 10.qcow2

sudo qemu-system-x86_64 \ -enable-kvm \ -m 4G \ -smp 4 \ -cpu host \ -drive file=win10.qcow2,if=virtio \ -drive file=Win10_22H2.iso,media=cdrom \ -drive file=virtio-win.iso,media=cdrom \ -cdrom Win10_22H2.iso \ -boot menu=on

qemu-img convert -f vdi -O qcow2 windows_10.vdi windows_10.qcow2 Use code with caution. Unlike raw disk images (

# Create base image qemu-img create -f qcow2 windows10_base.qcow2 64G

qemu-img create -f qcow2 win10.qcow2 80G If you would like to expand this deployment

: The .qcow2 (QEMU Copy-On-Write) format is highly efficient because it only grows in size as data is actually written to the disk, saving significant storage space on your host machine compared to fixed-size raw images.

If you would like to expand this deployment workflow, please let me know:

virsh snapshot-create-as --domain win10 --name "clean-install" --disk-only --atomic

Execute the following command to boot the VM with both the Windows 10 ISO and the VirtIO driver ISO attached: