Vultr and Virtio Part 2 – Creating Your Custom VM

At this point, you have already created your custom Windows ISO and are now ready to use said ISO to spin up a VM.

Deploy Your Windows Server

1. Login to your Vultr account
2. From the Servers area, click Deploy New Server:
   

   

3. Choose any server location you desire
4. Under Server Type, select Upload ISO and then the ISO which you uploaded previously:
   

   

5. Choose the Server Size and any Additional Features as required
6. Provide your server with a name and label is you like (both of these fields are optional)
7. Double check your settings and click Deploy Now:

8. 

At this point, Vultr will go away and create your new Windows instance in the background. This will probably take some time, so feel free to go do something else for 15 or 20 minutes. When you come back, you should be able to open up the console of your new server and run through the Windows installation process.

Install Windows

1. Assuming your server instance has completely deployed, click the ellipses to the right of the instance and select View Console:
   

   

2. At this stage of the process, you should be presented with the Windows installation:
   

   

   
   If you’re still getting the PXE boot console, either you haven’t waited long enough, or you should restart your server. If this still doesn’t work after ~30 minutes, try deleting the server and creating a new one with your ISO. If this still doesn’t work, try creating a new ISO, or try a different version of Windows (also check that the ISO has actually been mounted to the VM: Settings -> Custom ISO).
3. Run through the installation, and eventually you’ll hit this screen:
   

   

   
   So there doesn’t appear to be anywhere to install Windows (i.e. no hard drives are available). This is where your virtio drivers come in
4. Click Load driver:
   

   

5. Click Browse:
   

   

6. Drill down in the CD drive (which should have your ISO mounted) to D:\virtio\viostor\<winver>\amd64
   

    

   1. winver in the above location should be replaced with your Windows version, so I chose the w10 (e.g. Windows 10) folder, you might choose 2k2012r2
7. You will then be presented (hopefully) with a result like this:
   

   

8. Click Next
9. The HDD should now be available, and you can format it however you like, then click Next:
   

   

The Windows installation will now complete.

Post-Installation

Once the installation completes, there may be some additional steps required before your VM is fully functional.

If you have no network connectivity, for example, this might be due to the fact that the network drivers have not been installed.

1. Open Device Manager
2. Identify any Other Devices (anything with a yellow exclamation mark):
   

   

3. Right-click a device and click Update Driver
4. Click Browse…
   

   

5. Specify the CD-ROM drive and to include subfolders in the search:
   

   

6. Install each of the devices in turn as necessary

Once this process is complete, your VM should be up and running and ready to be used.