and load them during the "Load Driver" phase of the Windows installation. 3. Optimizing Image Size To keep your QCOW2 file lean: Zero-out free space: SDelete tool inside the VM to zero the empty disk space. Compress the image: After shutting down the VM, run:

Note : Some newer VirtIO drivers (version 204+) may not work with Windows 7 due to expired certificates; version is often recommended for compatibility. 2. Creating the QCOW2 Disk

To keep the image size manageable and performance high: