For a few months, I've resisted the Proxmox craze that has taken over a few of my XDA colleagues, but the truth is, Proxmox is a very interesting platform with some cool capabilities. It's basically a server for all your virtual machines and containers that can run all different kinds of services, and that's pretty cool.

My first experience with it is running Windows 11 in a VM, and to my surprise, it's a pretty usable experience. Windows 11 can run fairly smoothly in a Proxmox VM, and while setup can be a bit of a pain for a first-timer like me, this is definitely usable if you need to run some workloads in Windows remotely.

Setting up was complicated

First time? Yes, actually

Knowing something about tech definitely doesn't mean you know everything, and while I pride myself in knowing quite a lot about Windows, I was going in completely blind for Proxmox, so just getting started was not the easiest thing in the world. For some reason, I didn't initially realize that I needed the server to be plugged in via Ethernet in order to make it usable, and when I did, it seemed like the cable wasn't in properly and the Proxmox setup didn't detect the proper network settings to be accessible remotely. Eventually, though, I figured it out, and thankfully the Proxmox setup is way faster than something like Windows, so it wasn't overly hard to have to repeat the installation a few times.

With Proxmox running, I had to set up the Windows 11 VM, which wasn't overly hard thanks to the abundance of guides online, though I still failed some things like getting the internet to work. Thankfully, with help from my colleague Ayush Pande, I figured things out, and after that, using this as a main computer wasn't a problem anymore.

Windows 11 runs fairly well

Enough to write this article

I set up my VM with pretty solid specs, at least compared to the specs of the server that's running Proxmox. My Windows 11 VM has 8GB of RAM and a quad-core CPU, and with those specs, it honestly runs quite well — better than I expected for a VM. Animations aren't going to be the smoothest things in the world, but they're still decently fluid, and overall performance is just solid.

I didn't really feel like I was being significantly held back by the performance of this experience — so much so that I've been writing this article on my VM, and there's nothing about the experience that makes it feel unpleasant. I can tell it's not native, but it's really just because the VM has a lower resolution than the screen I'm using it on, not because of the performance. Using Vivaldi to access XDA's CMS wasn't a problem at all, and it felt pretty good.

I even tried installing a few other apps like Beeper, and it ran about as smoothly as I could have expected, too. PowerToys also worked just fine, and overall, it just felt like using a Windows 11 PC. At one point, the VM received Windows updates, and that also worked just fine.

Out of curiosity, I even tried running a Geekbench benchmark on it, and it performed decently there too, with a single-core score of 1,254 and multi-core score of 3,290.

Audio requires SPICE

A little extra setup

One thing I couldn't get working when accessing this VM from my Mac Mini was getting audio output from the Windows machine. Initially, I had forgotten to set up an audio device for the VM, but even with that, the default noVNC connection used by Proxmox to access the remote virtual machine doesn't support audio passthrough. For it to work, you have to use a SPICE connection instead, but according to the official website, the client for Macs is old and experimental, so I didn't want to mess with it.

Instead, I just accessed the VM through a different Windows PC with a SPICE client, and it worked pretty well, too. It's safe to say that if you're planning to edit videos on this VM — though I don't know why you would — this isn't going to be ideal, because there's a bit of a delay between the audio and video. That being said, it does work, so you can play music or watch videos on it if the audio timing matching the video isn't overly important. I did notice that audio became nearly unusable if I tried to take a screenshot of the VM, but it was fine before that.

Windows 11 runs fine on Proxmox

If you're setting up a home lab with Proxmox, the use cases for it are almost never ending, and after testing it, I can say running Windows 11 is also a completely valid option. The operating system ran decently well, and I had few issues aside from my own lack of knowledge regarding how to set up Proxmox, and once I figured things out, it was mostly smooth sailing from there. If you need a Windows machine you can access remotely using other PCs in your network, this is a viable solution, plus you can use Proxmox to host all other kinds of VMs and containers for different services.