Hello and welcome to Proxmox tutorials. 
I am computerized William, and in this video I will 
show you the installation of a Windows 2016 
Server on Proxmox VE.
In order to create a new virtual machine, just log 
in to your Proxmox VE admin interface and click 
on: create VM.
Choose the node and enter a name for your new 
VM. Click next. 
As OS type, choose Windows 10/2016. Click 
next.
Select the Windows 2016 installation ISO and 
click next.
For the hard disk, choose SCSI and the VM 
storage. 
I go for a local ZFS storage for this demo, 
therefore I use the default cache settings and I 
activate discard. 
If you want to know more about all these 
settings, just click on help and read more in our 
reference docu. 
It will open in a new window. 
Click next and set the CPU count. I choose 6 
cores. Click next.
I’ll need 4 GB Ram in my Windows, so I set 4096. 
Click next.
For the network, set VirtIO for best performance. 
And click next. 
Review your settings. In case you want to 
change anything, just go back to the 
correspondent tab. 
I change the CPU to 4 cores. Then I simply go 
back to the confirm tab and click finish.
Now the VM is created. You can see the 
progress in the taskbar.
The VM 129 now shows up in the tree. Select the 
new virtual machine. 
If you want to add some remarks click in the 
notes field and enter your notes.
Go to the hardware tab and add the VirtIO driver 
ISO.
Click on the options tab and enable the QEMU 
agent.
Now you can start the VM and on the console 
you can follow the Windows installation wizard. 
Select the needed keyboard layout and click next 
and install.
Select the needed keyboard layout and click next.
As I do not want to enter the license key right 
now, I choose to do it later.
In the next step choose the Windows variant. I go 
for 2016 standard with desktop. 
Click next and accept the license terms. 
Choose custom install and load the right VirtIO 
SCSI driver from the ISO. 
Click next. 
Confirm the installation disk and click next. 
Windows now will start the installation. This will 
take a few minutes depending on your hardware.
After a few minutes continue the installation by 
creating the password and log in.
Now open the computer management and go to 
the device manager. 
Right click the ethernet controller, and open the 
update driver wizard. 
Browse for the VirtIO network driver...
click next and install.
Do the same for the next PCI devices. The first is 
the VirtIO balloon device. 
For convenience, I just specify the root location. 
The Windows wizard will pick up the right driver 
automatically.
And last but not least select the VirtIO serial 
device, used for QEMU guest agent 
communication.
Now we are ready to install the QEMU guest 
agent. Just open the file explorer. 
Navigate to the guest agent and double click the 
installation file.
You can now see the service is installed and 
running.
Finally we can install the ballooning service. 
First copy paste the right directory to your 
program files directory and rename it to: Balloon.
Open the command line and navigate to this 
directory. 
The installation can be done with the command 
“blnsvr.exe -i” 
Do a refresh (with pressing F5 or manually). 
And you will see the new balloon service.
One benefit of the balloon service is the better 
memory reporting. 
Open the Windows task manager and compare 
the used memory with the value on the Proxmox 
VE interface. This should be identical. 
If you stop the balloon service, you will see the 
difference. 
Start it to get the right value again.
If I click on the shutdown button on Proxmox VE, 
the QEMU guest agent is shutting down reliably.
I hope the video could help you to install Windows 
2016 Server on Proxmox VE. Thanks for 
watching!
