Windows 11 Enterprise Virtual Machine images downloads
Windows 11 Enterprise virtual machine images are now available. You can download the images for several popular virtualization applications directly from Microsoft's Developer website.
Note that the virtual images include more than just a Windows 11 Enterprise installation. They are designed for developers and include several applications, e.g. Virtual Studio 2019 and Visual Studio Code. Developer Mode is also enabled automatically on these installations.
How to download Windows 11 Enterprise
Note that the title of the page is mentioning Windows 10 --Get a Windows 10 desktop environment -- but that the downloads are for Windows 11; this is likely something that Microsoft has overlooked and will address in the future.
To download the virtual machine images, do the following:
- Visit the Microsoft Developer website. The downloads are listed directly on the site that opens.
- Select one of the available Windows 11 Enterprise virtual machine images. All have a size of about 20 Gigabytes. The latest is the VMWare image, the smallest the Parallels image The following virtual images are provided:
- VMWare virtual image Windows 11 Enterprise.
- Hyper-V virtual image Windows 11 Enterprise.
- VirtualBox virtual image Windows 11 Enterprise.
- Parallels virtual image Windows 11 Enterprise.
- The download of the file starts immediately after one of the buttons is activated on the page.
The virtual machine images are set to expire on January 9, 2022 automatically. They contain a Windows 11 Enterprise installation with Windows Subsystem for Linux (Ubuntu) and Developer Mode enabled.
Windows Terminal, Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio 2019 and Windows 10 SDK version 2004 are installed as well.
The virtual machine images are designed primarily for developers, but none developers may use them as well to run Windows 11 Enterprise. Unless Enterprise is required specifically, it may be faster to download another edition of Windows 11 instead and create a virtual machine image manually using the downloaded ISO file.
Tip: check out our guide on downloading Windows 11 ISO images here.
Closing Words
The evaluation period feels rather short, considering that the images do expire in early January of 2022. Add the Holiday period of part of the globe to that, and you end up with just a few weeks in which the environment can be used in organizations.
Now You: what is your favorite Windows edition, and why? (via Deskmodder)
Is there any way to do a Powershell to reset the timer for these virtual machines like the 3 x 90 day for the old Windows 10 VMs?
How do I set up and use the hyper-v version?
Why does this work on PCs that do not meet the requirement for Windows 11?
Upgrade to Windows 11 is stopped in VirtualBox because the PC requirements are not met, but I have no problem installing this Enterprise Trial version on the same PC. Why is that?
I really like LTSC 2021 :)
What’s your favorite updated bits?
I can’t say I have any. There is hardware accelerated GPU scheduling and direct storage support, also a toggle to force/attempt variable refresh rate on certain titles, I guess from Store, maybe normally unsupported.
Notepad defaults to UTF-8, finally!
Edge is installed by default, but it’s not the one which is glued to the OS, rather the installable one, and you can uninstall it from Control Panel.
Overall, I like it. My favourite is still LTSC 1507, although it saw very little support and has lots of unsolved issues. I suppose not having a Server counterpart shows.
Thanks for the response Y.
For me it seems to run a bit smoother overall,
although I have had several BSOD that I need to look into (watchdog timer errors).
I’ll thoroughly give it a test drive during the coming weeks.
Cheers