Windows 11 enforces strict hardware requirements, including Trusted Platform Module (TPM 2.0) and Secure Boot validation. When launching your high-quality QCOW2 image, your hypervisor configuration must emulate these chips. Crucial Hypervisor Configurations:

The main trade-off is a small CPU and I/O overhead compared to RAW format, due to QCOW2's metadata handling. For most users, the storage efficiency and feature set outweigh this minor performance cost.

Platforms focusing on KVM or Proxmox often provide pre-configured templates.

Run this simple command using QEMU disk utilities to convert a safe, official image to QCOW2:

This is especially useful for those who have existing Windows virtual machines from other hypervisors and want to bring them into a KVM environment.