Microsoft is once again having some unknown problems with its official virtual machines. However, this time, it is not only about the delisted in July Parallels configuration—all four variants are no longer available for download.
On October 23, 2024, all Windows 11 Development Environment virtual machines expired, which means if you still have one up and running, you will now face activation issues. Since Windows Development Environment does not support activation with product keys, expired virtual machines will turn their desktop background black and shut down every hour.
Microsoft does not say much about what happened to its virtual machines. All we have is a brief message on the official website that says the following:
Note: Due to ongoing technical issues, as of October 23, 2024, downloads are temporarily unavailable.
The last update for Windows 11 Development Environment virtual machine was released in July 2024. It was based on Windows 11 build 22621.3880 (July 2024 Patch Tuesday updates). In early August, Microsoft restored the previously missing virtual machines for VMware, thus bumping the expiration date to October 23. Now, with October 23 behind us, customers and developers can no longer download and properly use Microsoft"s evaluation virtual machines.
For those unfamiliar, Windows 11 Development Environment was available in four configurations: Hyper-V, Parallels for Mac, VirtualBox, and VMware. They are prebuilt virtual machines based on Windows 11 Enterprise, and they pack all the tools one would need to start building Windows apps: Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition with UWP, .NET Desktop, Azure, and Windows App SDK for C#, Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 with Ubuntu, Windows Terminal, and Developer mode.
We will keep an eye on Microsoft"s Windows 11 virtual machines and notify you once they are available for download once again.