Microsoft recently started enforcing Windows 11 hardware compatibility rules for virtual machines, requiring SecureBoot, UEFI, and a TPM module to get the latest builds. As a result, many users noticed that their VMs could no longer download and install fresh updates. If you use Hyper-V or commercial virtualization software (VMWare Workstation, for example), you can add TPM modules to your virtual machines. The problem is that TPM modules are not available in free virtualization apps, such as VMWare Player or VirtualBox. Fortunately, developers of the latter work on fixing the situation.
According to changeset 90946 on the official VirtualBox website, Oracle prepares a passthrough driver to let virtual machines utilize the host's Trusted Platform Module. Such a change will render virtual machines compatible with Windows 11 and let users test preview versions of the latest operating system from Microsoft while staying on the stable build.
Oracle created a document with a TPM passthrough driver for VMs a couple of weeks before Microsoft started enforcing hardware requirements on virtual machines. Unfortunately, we do not know when Oracle plans to ship an updated version of VirtualBox with a TPM passthrough driver. Until then, you can use Hyper-V to run Windows 11 inside a virtual machine. Just keep in mind that Hyper-V is available only on x64 versions of Windows Professional, Enterprise, and Education. We have a dedicated guide on how to install Windows 11 using Hyper-V.
It is also worth mentioning that existing Windows 11 installations on virtual machines will continue working but will not get any feature updates to newer builds.
Microsoft plans to ship Windows 11 to the public on October 5, 2021. The operating system will be available via Windows Update on supported hardware (SecureBoot, UEFI, TPM 2.0, and Intel's 8th gen or AMD's Ryzen 2nd gen CPUs or better), but users can also clean-install Windows 11 with the help of the Media Creation Tool (including computers with unsupported hardware).
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