Sometimes testing an operating system can be complicated. Above all, if you have such special requirements as those found in Windows 11. The latest Microsoft system can even give us problems when starting it up in a virtual machine due, among other things, to TPM 2.0. For this reason, Microsoft wants to make it easier for us to be able to test its operating system in a virtualized way, allowing us to download its new virtual machines for free.
A virtual machine is a “computer” that runs inside a program (known as a hypervisor), in which we can install an operating system to test it as if it were installed inside our main system. In this way, we can use it for whatever we want with the certainty that nothing we do in it will affect our main system. Not even if, for example, we end up infected by a virus.
We can mount our own virtual machines with programs like VMware or VirtualBox. Even Windows has its own hypervisor, Hyper-V, on which we can install any system (although in a more complex way). But, if we don’t know how to start, Microsoft allows us download already created virtual machines that we can use on our computer completely free of charge.
New Windows 11 virtual machines
This same weekend, Microsoft has published its new virtual machines Windows 11 Development Environment (WDE). These machines are totally free and we can use them to test the operating system in a simple way, or for whatever we want. When we download them, what we will find, among other things, will be:
- Windows 11 Enterprise 22H2 updated to Moment 2.
- Visual Studio 2022 Community Edition with UWP, .NET Desktop, Azure, and Windows App SDK.
- Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 activated and Ubuntu installed as standard.
- Windows Terminal.
- Developer mode enabled by default.
These machines are fully functional for a short period of time, specifically until July 18 of this year. At that time, Windows 11 will ask us for an Enterprise edition key, or we will have to download the new virtual images that the company has published to start from scratch with this virtualized system.
Clearly, they are virtual machines focused on business use and for programmers. But, if we have not tried Windows 11 yet, thanks to them we will be able to do it in a very simple way. And we will only need to have 8 GB of RAM and 23 GB of hard disk space on the PC.
How to download
To download these virtualized systems, what we have to do is enter this link. Here we will find all the images that we have available for this system: VMware, VirtualBox, Parallels or Hyper-V. We select the one we want, and the download will begin.
Once the virtual machine is downloaded, we unzip it, and we execute the file that comes with it with our virtualization program. It will automatically create the virtual machine for us, and it will mount the hard drive provided by Microsoft in order to start using this operating system.
We simply follow the steps indicated by the system to start it up, and we can start using the new Windows 11 without limits while the trial version of the virtual machine lasts. When we get tired of it, just delete it and it will disappear without a trace from our computer.
