Microsoft included some basic requirements that must be met to install Windows 11. Although you can install Windows 11 on hardware that doesn’t meet the minimum requirements, Microsoft does not recommend such installation methods. At the time of this writing, a virtual machine created for Windows 11 on VirtualBox will not allow it to be installed through the normal process. Although Windows 11 VM template is included with VirtualBox, it is still not compatible and won’t allow you to install Windows 11 the traditional way. To be able to install Windows 11 on VirtualBox, you’ll need to include some bypass registry flags, and we will show you how to do that when we’re installing Windows 11. Below is a glance at the minimum system requirements to run Windows 11. The hardware requirements are very similar to Windows 10 minimum requirements with a few key differences.
How to create a new virtual machine for Windows 11 on VirtualBox
As mentioned above, VirtualBox has Windows 11 setup template included. However, when you use the template to create a new virtual machine to install Windows 11, you’ll get an error that the system does not meet Windows 11 requirements. Below are steps to create a virtual machine for Windows 11. In our next post, we’ll show you how to get past Windows 11 requirements checks. The first step is to properly configure the virtual machine in the following way, based on official “Windows 11 Specs and System Requirements” and your system needs to have a properly updated x86 CPU. If you haven’t already installed VirtualBox on your host computer, here’s a post below that shows you how to do that. How to install VirtualBox on Windows 11 Once VirtualBox is installed, open it and click Machine > New as shown in the image below. On the new setup window, in the Name field, type a descriptive name for the virtual machine you are setting up. In the Machine Folder field, browse and choose where to store the virtual machine files, or simply accept the default location in your Documents folder. In the Type field, choose Microsoft Windows. In the Version field, select Windows 11 (64-bit) template. Click Next to continue. On the next screen, you’ll be asked to choose the virtual machine memory size. Because you selected Windows 11 template, it will default to 4096 MB to meet Windows 11 memory requirement. Next, you’ll be prompted to choose the virtual machine’s hard disk size. Again, by default, it will allocate an 80 GB disk size to meet Windows 11 disk requirement. Select the option to Create a virtual hard disk now and click Create. Next, you’ll be prompted to select the hard disk type. Choose VDI (VirtualBox Disk Image) as highlighted below. Next, select the Dynamically allocated hard disk drive. Finally, click Create to create the virtual machine hard disk drive and complete the setup. A new virtual machine should be created on the left. It’s now ready to install Windows 11 on it. Now you should be able to install Windows 11. If you haven’t already done so, read the post below. How to install Windows 11 on VirtualBox guest machines That’s it! Conclusion: This post showed you how to create a virtual machine to install Windows 11 on. If you find any error above or have something to add, please use the comment form below.
