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They expire but you can, and they advise you to, snapshot and roll back. The purpose is to stop you just using it as a windows vm for doing work on.

pluma 11y ago
This is probably obvious but worth noting anyway: remember to do the snapshot before you start the VM. The expiry countdown starts the first time you boot the VM and is date-based so the VM will expire even if you only used it once.
- 0x0 11y ago
  On the other hand, having a snapshot in a booted state gets you up and testing much quicker for subsequent runs. Even if it will expire after a while, you'll get one hour of work in before windows shuts down, and then you just restore the snapshot again.
  - pluma 11y ago
    Really? I'm pretty sure at least one of the VMs was completely locked down when booted up after it had expired. Not sure which version of Windows that was, though. That said, what I generally do is to simply suspend the VM instead of resetting it to the snapshot. Then when it expires I can still do a reset to the snapshot to reset the expiry. I generally boot at least the IE8 VM up before using it in order to install basic things like the Flash player (to test the Flash fallback for HTML5 media players).
    - 0x0 11y ago
      That's what I meant :) You can't reboot after expiration.
- acqq 11y ago
  What is the difference between saving the original ZIP file and doing the snapshot before starting the VM?
  - nness 11y ago
    I think you need to do an import first, so it is faster to just rollback to a snapshot than re-import each time. I prefer snapshots so I can configure the network as needed for our corporate environment (saving me from doing that each and every time).
  - pluma 11y ago
    If you save the zip file you need to do the following: 1. extract the VM bundle 2. install and configure the VM (this is automated but can take up to several minutes) 3. boot up the VM By using a snapshot you skip steps 1 and 2 and resetting a snapshot is pretty much instant, so you're only left with step 3.

pluma 11y ago

This is probably obvious but worth noting anyway: remember to do the snapshot before you start the VM. The expiry countdown starts the first time you boot the VM and is date-based so the VM will expire even if you only used it once.

0x0 11y ago
On the other hand, having a snapshot in a booted state gets you up and testing much quicker for subsequent runs. Even if it will expire after a while, you'll get one hour of work in before windows shuts down, and then you just restore the snapshot again.
- pluma 11y ago
  Really? I'm pretty sure at least one of the VMs was completely locked down when booted up after it had expired. Not sure which version of Windows that was, though. That said, what I generally do is to simply suspend the VM instead of resetting it to the snapshot. Then when it expires I can still do a reset to the snapshot to reset the expiry. I generally boot at least the IE8 VM up before using it in order to install basic things like the Flash player (to test the Flash fallback for HTML5 media players).
  - 0x0 11y ago
    That's what I meant :) You can't reboot after expiration.
acqq 11y ago
What is the difference between saving the original ZIP file and doing the snapshot before starting the VM?
- nness 11y ago
  I think you need to do an import first, so it is faster to just rollback to a snapshot than re-import each time. I prefer snapshots so I can configure the network as needed for our corporate environment (saving me from doing that each and every time).
- pluma 11y ago
  If you save the zip file you need to do the following: 1. extract the VM bundle 2. install and configure the VM (this is automated but can take up to several minutes) 3. boot up the VM By using a snapshot you skip steps 1 and 2 and resetting a snapshot is pretty much instant, so you're only left with step 3.