This is a problem many people encounter when first deploying a virtual machine on Microsoft Windows: storage detection.

I’ll show you how to deploy a Windows virtual machine on Nutanix AHV.

Prerequisites

To begin, download the VirtIO ISO image from the Nutanix Support website (registration required): https://portal.nutanix.com/page/downloads?product=ahv

Remember to select “VirtIO” from the drop-down menu at the top of the page, then download the “Nutanix VirtIO for Windows (iso)” version:

Once the ISO image is downloaded, you need to transfer it to the cluster.

Now let’s move on to deploying the virtual machine.

Creating the virtual machine under Prism Element

Log in to the Prism Element web interface of your Nutanix cluster, then select “VM” from the menu:

On the virtual machine management page, click “Create VM” in the top right corner:

In the window that appears, there are a number of fields to fill in:

In order:

• Virtual machine name
• Time zone
• Amount of vCPUs
• Amount of RAM

Next, you need to add one or more disks:

For each type of disk you want to add, you will need to select the appropriate options:

In the case of our VM, we’ll add:

• 1 40GB disk for the operating system
• 1 CD-ROM with the Windows ISO
• 1 CD-ROM with the VirtIO ISO

You should have 3 disks at this point:

Adding a network adapter is the last step before finalizing the creation of the virtual machine:

If you’re unsure how to add new networks to your cluster, I recommend reading my article on the subject: Nutanix AHV – Add subnet to your cluster

The machine is now created, and you can proceed with its deployment.

Creating the Virtual Machine in Prism Central

To create the VM in Prism Central, go to the “Infrastructure > Compute > VMs” menu:

Then click on “Create VM” to access the VM creation menu:

The fields to be filled in remain generally similar to those you can find under Prism Element, although organized slightly differently:

And spread over several tabs:

Since the process is generally identical, I won’t go into detail about all the steps. One notable difference: the ability to assign one or more categories to our VM upon creation:

The last tab allows you to check all the information that we have just configured:

Deploying the Virtual Machine

To deploy the virtual machine, boot it and launch the console. The first step is to choose the language:

Then click on “Install now”:

Then select the version you want to install:

Accept the license agreement:

Now click on “Custom…”:

Damn! The hard drive you configured when creating the virtual machine is not showing up… Click “Load a driver” to fix this problem:

Click on “Browse”:

Now navigate to the directory corresponding to the version of Windows you are deploying, in my case Windows Server 2022:

Select all drivers from the list and click “Next”:

Once the driver installation is complete, the disk finally appears:

The installation is launched, all you have to do is wait:

Your virtual machine is deployed!