Microsoft fails to provide Windows 10 VM images for developers
Enlarge / Image not found: why has it taken Microsoft five days (and counting) to upload fresh developer VM images for non-Hyper-V platforms? (credit: Sean Gladwell / Getty Images)
Update 7:50 pm EDT: Access to the missing virtual machine images was restored several hours after this article published. The original story follows unchanged-we'll update it if we ever receive a response from Microsoft.
Original story 4:45 pm EDT: Microsoft typically makes Windows 10 Enterprise virtual machine images available to independent developers via its developer.microsoft.com portal. For some reason, that process fell through the cracks this month-images are available now for Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor but are conspicuously missing for competing hypervisors VMWare, Parallels, and VirtualBox.
@windowsdev It's pretty telling that you guys have let the free VMWare/VirtualBox/Parallels Windows dev images expire but updated the HyperV image. Preferential treatment much?@VMware @virtualbox @ParallelsMac @ParallelsCares Antitrust? @FTC Yo, we got shenanigans afoot!
- Matthew Boyette (@Dyndrilliac) July 12, 2021
Ars first became aware of this problem via impassioned tweets from Matthew Boyette, an Ars reader and independent developer whose workflow depends on these Windows 10 Enterprise VM images. The images themselves are decidedly ephemeral-they expire each month, requiring devs using the program to download new, refreshed images.
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