QEMU/Guests/Windows 7

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The Windows 7 desktop.

Windows 7 is an operating system created by Microsoft, released October 22, 2009. Support ended on January 14, 2020.

Running on CollabVM

Windows 7 works great as a VM for CollabVM. VM 1 on CollabVM runs Windows 7 Ultimate x64 and has been running Windows 7 for around 2 years.

Windows 7 is, however, painfully slow without virtualization, so if you don't have a server with virtualization, you may want to go with Windows XP instead. You may also have luck with [Tiny7] on systems without virtualization.

Recommended version: Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit with Service Pack 1

Starting up

QEMU

Pre-installation

Make a qcow2 image (or a raw image if you want) by typing

qemu-img create -f qcow2 win7.img 40G

Windows 7 requires some disk space, you can make this 20 gigabytes if you want but it is recommended to have at least 40 GB for users to install programs onto.

When that's done, run the following command:

qemu-system-i386 -hda win7.img -cdrom win7_iso_name.iso -boot d -enable-kvm -cpu host -m 1G -vga std -net nic,model=rtl8139 -net user -usbdevice tablet -localtime

Or if running without root or virtualization:

qemu-system-i386 -hda win7.img -cdrom win7_iso_name.iso -boot d -cpu qemu64 -m 1G -vga std -net nic,model=rtl8139 -net user -usbdevice tablet -localtime

If you're running 64-bit Windows 7, you're going to want to up the memory up to 2 gigabytes. Windows 7 uses memory better than Vista, although it still performs pretty badly under only 512 MB of RAM. If you're on a server with small resources (but with virtualization), you may want to take a look at Tiny7, which is optimized for lower-end computers.

If you don't have virtualization enabled, then it is highly recommended to go with Tiny7 and turn the Aero theme off. Like Windows Vista, this helps with the load slightly (but not much). To do that in Windows 7, right click the desktop, click "Personalization", select the "Windows Classic" theme, and close the window. Also, if you don't have virtualization enabled, the 64-bit version of Windows DOES work, but is hideously slow, so go with 32-bit Windows 7 instead.

After installation

qemu-system-i386 -hda win7.img -boot c -enable-kvm -cpu host -m 1G -vga std -net nic,model=rtl8139 -net user -usbdevice tablet -localtime

Or if running without root or virtualization:

qemu-system-i386 -hda win7.img -boot c -cpu qemu64 -m 1G -vga std -net nic,model=rtl8139 -net user -usbdevice tablet -localtime

Setting up your VM

After going through the OOBE, it is recommended to go through gpedit.msc and manage some policies. If you have an AD (Active Directory) server, you can hook up your VM to that and manage policies there. If you want, you can also "debloat" the OS making it run slightly faster, though, versions earlier than 8.1 are not as bad.

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