With any new OS, especially Windows, your daily workstation you want to try the new one in a virtual machine environment before upgrading them to replace as your main daily driver. With that said, the only way right now to experience a Windows 11 preview release is by upgrading via a Windows 10 Insider Preview.
If you are on the latest Dev channel of Windows 10 Insider build, you will automatically be updated to this latest Windows 11 build.
You can go head to https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windowsinsiderpreviewiso to grab the latest Windows 10 Insider Preview. Ensure select the Dev channel, the build number at the time of this writing is 21354
Windows10_InsiderPreview_Client_x64_en-us_21354.iso
Once installed you don’t even need to login with your MS account, I was able to upgrade a local account just fine. All you need to do is keep Windows Update up to date. With any luck you should see “Windows 11 Insider Preview 10.0.22000.51” is installing.
Once that’s done you just need to hit the restart.
Note make sure your VM is running with the basic compatible virtualized hardware. I forgot to have mine setup with the proper number of CPU cores.
With any luck, you should be able to see a new login screen and hear a new boot-up sound. It’s highly recommended to enable virtual graphic acceleration. Whether you are using Virtualbox or Window’s built-in Hyper-V, any existing virtualization platform that runs Windows 10 should be able to run this and does the trick.
What you get from this version of preview as expected comes with bunch of limited functionalities. For instance, you don’t have a way to run Android apps yet, that’s coming later in future version of Windows 11 insider preview. It’s expected that by the end of this year we should see a version of Windows 11 that allows us to run that ‘smoothly’. I’m very much looking forward to that day and can’t wait to test it out.