Microsoft's official Windows 11 virtual machine is no longer available

As of October 23, 2024, all Windows 11 Development Environment virtual machines have expired. This means that if you still have a virtual machine running, it will now also have activation issues. Since the Windows Development Environment does not support activation with a product key, expired virtual machines will turn their desktop background black and shut down every 60 minutes.

Microsoft hasn't shared much about the current state of these virtual machines. All we have is a brief announcement on the official website that reads as follows:

Note: Due to ongoing technical issues, as of October 23, 2024, downloads are temporarily unavailable.

Microsoft's official Windows 11 virtual machine is no longer available Picture 1

The final update for Windows 11 Development Environment virtual machines was released in July 2024. This update is based on Windows 11 build 22621.3880 (the July 2024 Patch Tuesday update). In early August, Microsoft restored previously missing virtual machines to VMware, pushing the expiration date up to October 23. Now that the October 23 milestone has passed, customers and developers can no longer properly download and use Microsoft evaluation virtual machines.

If you didn't know, the Windows 11 Development Environment is available in four configurations: Hyper-V, Parallels for Mac, VirtualBox, and VMware. They are pre-built virtual machines based on Windows 11 Enterprise and contain all the tools you need to start building Windows apps: Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition with UWP, .NET Desktop, Azure and Windows App SDKs for C#, Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 with Ubuntu, Windows Terminal, and Developer mode.

TipsMake.com will continue to update information about Windows 11 virtual machines and will update this article when they are available for download again.

Lesley Montoya

Update 29 October 2024