Run Windows VM on macOS

Make sure UTM is installed on your macOS machine.

Installing Windows 11

We will be installing Windows 11. You can find the official documentation here.

1. Install CrystalFetch using Homebrew: brew install --cask crystalfetch.
2. Open CrystalFetch and select Windows 11 as version, Latest as build, Apple Silicon as architecture, English (United States) as language and Windows 11 as edition.
3. Click on “Download”.
4. Open UTM and click the “+” button to open the VM creation wizard.
5. Select “Virtualize”.
6. Select “Windows”.
7. Pick the amount of RAM and CPU cores you wish to give access to the VM. I chose 4GB RAM and default CPU Cores. Press “Continue” to continue.
8. Check “Install Windows 10 or higher” and “Install drivers and SPICE tools”.
9. Click on “Browse” to load the previously downloaded ISO image. Press “Continue” to continue.
10. Specify the maximum amount of drive space to allocate. I chose 64GB as the disk size. Press “Continue” to continue.
11. We will setup shared directory later on. Press “Continue” to continue.
12. Update name to Windows-11.
13. Press “Save” to create the VM and press the Run button to start the VM.
14. Go through the Windows installer. Make sure to choose Windows 11 Pro, set name to ishahroz and add password if you want (I left it blank).
15. Once the Windows installation is complete, finish the UTM Guest Tools installer.
16. Quit the VM, unmount the installer ISO and Guest Tools ISO, and start the VM again to boot into your new installation.

Set up WSL 1

1. Read this section on why WSL 2 doesn’t have virtualization support yet and how to instead set up WSL 1 on Windows VM.
2. We will set username same as ishahroz.