Upgrade your Microsoft Windows 10 VM to 11 on the ITS Private Cloud

Based on the https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/windows/windows-11-specifications?r=1#:~:text=System%20firmware-,UEFI,-%2C%20Secure%20Boot%20capable , we have gathered the following checklist to help bringing your Windows 10 to the latest Windows 11.

Pre-Upgrade checklist

UEFI and Secure Boot. Existing Windows 10 virtual instance should be using UEFI and Secure Boot. Check status with If you would like to migrate from bios to efi, please read the following Microsoft document https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/mbr-to-gpt

Guest Operating System. Virtual machine configured operating system should match the running operating system. Check with vss-cli --columns moref,name,guest_full_name,guest_full_name_run compute vm ls -f name={vm-name} both must be the same.

Virtual Machine Version. Recommended Virtual Machine version is vmx-19. If your instance version is lower, perform an upgrade: vss-cli compute vm set <id> version vmx vmx-19.

vTPM. vTrusted Platform Module (TPM) should be added to virtual instance: vss-cli compute vm set <id> tpm mk.

VBS. Virtualization-Based Security enabled. If disabled, please enable with: vss-cli compute vm set <id> vbs on

Upgrade process

The following steps were contributed and tested by joint efforts between the Client Success & Service Delivery team (Andrew Tomkins, thank you!) and the ITS Private Cloud team at EIS.

Shut down the system (full shut down)
vss-cli --wait compute vm set <id> state shutdown --confirm
Power on the virtual machine (system then picks up new chipset identifiers)
vss-cli --wait compute vm set <id> state on
Proceed with upgrade as you like (e.g. by mounting an ISO or using Windows Update). To mount the ISO execute:
vss-cli --wait compute vm set <id> cd up --backing Windows_11

Questions

As always please reach out to vss (at) eis.utoronto.ca if you have any questions or experience any issues.