Despite the impressive processing capabilities of the newer Raspberry Pi boards, certain demanding projects remain out of their reach. For instance, you wouldn’t expect a mere Raspberry Pi SBC to run dozens of virtual machines on Proxmox. Nor would you expect this pint-sized machine to run high-capacity HDDs in RAID 10 and share the storage pool at 10GbE speeds.

Likewise, running Windows 11 has always been a pipe dream for Raspberry Pi enthusiasts. I’ve previously tinkered with different ways to get Microsoft’s flagship operating system up and running on my Raspberry Pi 5, and a bare-metal installation was barely functional. Deploying it as a Runtipi container worked to some extent, but I had to deal with low resolution and somewhat degraded performance.

So, you can’t blame me for being a little skeptical about the performance of the Botspot VM method, which runs Windows 11 inside a dedicated virtual machine. But after testing it out myself, it’s easily the best method for tinkering with Windows 11 on the Raspberry Pi. Of course, it’s not going to deliver the same responsiveness as Raspberry Pi OS or FydeOS. But its solid performance and sky-high compatibility with most Windows 11 tools make it worth checking out.

Botspot VM has a lengthy but straightforward setup process

Best of all, it doesn’t force me to go through multiple Microsoft ads

Considering that I had to spend hours manually configuring every setting and disabling privacy-intrusive apps when performing a bare-metal installation of Windows 11 on the RPi, I was prepared to deal with a complicated setup procedure for the Botspot VM. However, it’s surprisingly easy to get up and running, as the BVM app from Pi-Apps (both are designed by the same developer, by the way) not only held my hand throughout the initialization sequence, but also did most of the work for me.

But before I cover the installation procedure, let me go over the RPi’s specs real quick. I used the 8GB variant of the Raspberry Pi 5 alongside a 500GB external SSD for this project, since I didn’t want a mere microSD card to bottleneck the speed and storage capacity for this project. That said, I chose the GUI variant of the Raspberry Pi OS for the project, mostly because I didn’t want to sift through a barrage of terminal commands to troubleshoot any errors that might have cropped up when testing the Botspot VM.

Anyway, once I’d finished installing the OS, I quickly grabbed Pi-Apps using the wget -qO- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Botspot/pi-apps/master/install | bash command. Then, I located the Botspot VM package within Pi-Apps and installed it.

Running the tool revealed six labeled steps, and I had to run each of them sequentially to deploy a functional Windows 11 VM. Once I’d completed the New Virtual Machine step, I used the Edit Configuration File button to make some edits to the vm_username, vm_password, and disk_space for my Windows 11 instance. Then, I waited for Botspot VM to grab the necessary packages during the Download Components step, though the Prepare for Installation part barely took a couple of seconds. As I expected, the Install Windows 11 step took nearly two hours, but the silver lining was that I didn’t have to go through the aggravating first-install sequence for the OS. Soon, the Run Windows 11 step was available, and it was time to gauge the performance of the VM.

Most Windows apps work well on the Windows 11 virtual machine

It’s surprisingly usable for everyday tasks

The first thing I noticed after signing in to the VM was how responsive everything felt. On a 1080p screen, with the Windows 11 virtual machine occupying half the screen, I was able to work on the Raspberry Pi OS as well as the VM without any performance issues whatsoever. Once I’d installed Brave, I opened twenty browser tabs, and switching between them was pretty seamless.

Next, I tried to test a handful of everyday applications on the VM. Darktable worked really well – to the point where I even used it to resize screenshots for this article. Likewise, the LibreOffice suite, Krita, Inkscape, and other essential tools worked without a hitch. I quickly imported some projects into VS Code and armed it with a couple of extensions – and I had no trouble editing some YAML configs on the VM. I also installed Visual Studio, since it’s not something available on Linux. Although I wouldn’t use it for complex projects on such an underpowered setup, Botspot VM worked really well for minor coding tasks. Now, the experience wasn’t as smooth as running it on a high-end CPU with tons of RAM, but it felt pretty responsive for a virtualized setup deployed on a mere Raspberry Pi.

You might want to look elsewhere for gaming

The same holds true for virtualization tasks

Of course, this article wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t attempt something as wacky as running games on the VM. Barring certain edge-case scenarios, GPU passthrough isn’t possible on the virtual machine, so I didn’t expect my Raspberry Pi-powered Windows 11 VM to run triple-A gaming titles. 2D games, on the other hand, were a mixed bag. Steam worked without any issues – a far cry from my attempts at getting it to run natively on the Raspberry Pi. But as you may have guessed, the performance was less than stellar on games that require tighter controls.

Although the VM could boot Dead Cells and Crypt of the Necrodancer, the microstutter and input lag made it difficult to play them. Disco Elysium and Terraria didn’t fare any better, either, with the former taking noticeably long to load into the game. Meanwhile, titles like Gnosia ran well, though the game would briefly slow down during scene transitions. Wallpaper Engine also worked, provided I disabled the animations on certain wallpapers. Virtualization – or should I say nested virtualization, considering Windows 11 is running inside a VM – apps didn’t work either, since there was no way to enable SVM. That meant I couldn't tinker with WSL2 projects on my Botspot virtual machine. I also hooked my SBC to a 4K monitor, but the performance took a noticeable hit. In its defense, you can blame that on the extra overhead caused by the GUI elements of Raspberry Pi OS.

It’s still a solid option for running everyday Windows 11 apps on the Raspberry Pi

Long story short, I’m really impressed with the Botspot Windows 11 VM package. Yes, it’s not perfect for anything even remotely GPU-intensive. Nor can it run dozens of apps simultaneously without encountering performance issues. But if you’re looking for a simple way to tinker with Windows 11 on the Raspberry Pi, learn about PowerShell scripting, or create basic .NET code with Visual Studio, Botspot VM is at least worth checking out. Pair it with a light distro such as DietPi and throw in a blazing-fast NVMe SSD alongside a HAT-based adapter, and this project is bound to perform even better than my setup.