install the virtio driver on Windows - Elastic Compute Service

In some scenarios, you may want to create a custom image based on the operating system data of a source server, import the image to Alibaba Cloud, and then create an Elastic Compute Service (ECS) instance from the image. The source server can be a physical server, a virtual machine, or a cloud host. If the virtio driver is not installed on the source server, the created ECS instance may be unable to start. To prevent this issue, check that the virtio driver is installed on the source server before you import the image to Alibaba Cloud. You can perform the operations described in this topic to install the virtio driver on Windows by using an installation package.

Procedure

Download the virtio driver package provided by Alibaba Cloud to a source server.
Download address: virtio driver package
The downloaded package is named 220915.0953.0953_bin.zip.
Decompress 220915.0953.0953_bin.zip and then open the220915.0953.0953_bin folder.
In the folder, you can find the subfolders that correspond to different Windows versions.
Each subfolder contains an amd64 subfolder that stores driver installation files for 64-bit operating systems.
- win10: This subfolder contains an amd64 subfolder that stores driver installation files suitable for Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2022, and Windows 10.
- Win8: This subfolder contains an amd64 subfolder that stores driver installation files for Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1.
- win7: This subfolder contains an amd64 subfolder that stores driver installation files for Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.
Open an appropriate subfolder based on the operating system of the source server.
In this example, the source server runs Windows Server 2019 64-bit. Run the following command in Windows PowerShell to open the amd64 subfolder in the C:\test\220915.0953.0953_bin\win10\amd64 directory:
```
cd C:\test\220915.0953.0953_bin\Win10\amd64
```
Note
If you are logged on to the Windows instance as a regular user, obtain administrative permissions and then run the preceding command with the permissions. If you are logged on to the Windows instance as a system user, directly run the command.
Run the following command in Windows PowerShell to install a new version of the virtio driver:
```
pnputil -i -a *.inf
```
The command output shown in the following figure indicates that the virtio driver is installed.
Restart the source server. The virtio driver takes effect after the source server is restarted.

References

After you install the virtio driver on Windows, you can obtain a Windows image file. For more information, see Obtain a Windows image file.
Specific operations on Windows instances depend on the version of the virtio driver contained in images. For example, the online disk resizing operation requires a virtio driver version that is later than 58011 in the associated image, and queries for disk serial numbers require a virtio driver version that is later than 58017 in the associated image. If the current virtio driver version does not meet the requirement of an operation that you want to perform, update the driver before you perform the operation. For more information, see Update Red Hat virtio drivers of Windows instances.