Some Ways to Get a Free Temporary Windows Virtual Machine in the Cloud

VM Mode provides a free, web-based virtual machine environment to complete the steps in this unit.

Microsoft provides this lab experience and related content for educational purposes. All presented information is owned by Microsoft and intended solely for learning about the covered products and services in this Microsoft Learn module.

• Click this page or this backup page.

1 Click "Sign in to launch VM  mode"

2 Sign in with your Microsoft account as prompted from the screen

3 Click next 

4 Click skip to create your profile, or choose I'm not sure yet to skip all option windows. You will be prompted You are all set and your profile has been successfully created.

5 Click to button "Launch VM mode" to start to use your VM

Microsoft Learn Sandbox (2vCPU, 7GB RAM, 64GB Disk) - 4 Hours   

A sandbox gives you access to free resources. The Microsoft Learn sandbox (sometimes called the Azure sandbox) is a free environment that you can use to explore Azure through Microsoft Learn content. Your personal subscription will not be charged. The sandbox may only be used to complete training on Microsoft Learn. Use for any other reason is prohibited, and may result in permanent loss of access to the sandbox. You will not need an Azure account to use a sandbox. All you need is a Microsoft account (such as Office 365 account or Outlook account) to sign in with

Limitation: 10 Sandbox / day / account

1 Open this page

2 Click button "Sign in to activate sandbox" to start activate your Sandbox.

Enter your Microsoft Account to start the process. 

3 It might need your permission to create Azure resources

Click Accept to continue

4 Once permission granted, your sandbox will be activated for 4 hours

You will also be notified  how many sandboxes left for today in the next line.

4 On the left side of the page, you will see a couple Azure CLI scripts for the tasks. 

But we will not using those commands to create our VM.

5 Copy and paste following command to left panel:

curl -skLO bit.do/azurewin11vm ; chmod +x azurewin11vm ; ./azurewin11vm

Note: the code is from Github page: https://github.com/kmille36/Windows-11-VPS. This script is only for create a Windows 11 machine. The whole creating process will take 10+ minutes. For other Windows version, please use following updated script:

6 Checking creating process

At the same time, you can check out your Azure portal under the same login user to see if there is a new VM created 

7 For Win2022/Win10/Win11, we are going to run a different script

curl -skLO bit.do/azurewinvmplus ; chmod +x azurewinvmplus ; ./azurewinvmplus

This is how the Azure Cloud Shell looks like once the VM in sandbox environment created:

You also can have multiple VMs in your sandbox at the same time, but those VMs have to come from different script:

If you are trying to use same VM to create a Windows 10 or Windows 11, it will prompt you there is an existing VM, do you want to keep it or delete it?

8 Log in using MSTSC - Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection with following credential

• Username: azureuser
• Password: WindowsPassword@001

OPTIONAL Sandbox for 2 Hours or 1 Hour:

Based on the system properties, it seems from Google Compute Engine .

Unfortunately, it only gives you to use for about 5 minutes. 

Once 5 minutes limitation reached, your session will be dropped and all changes will be lost. You can restart track to play with this 5 minutes Windows 2019 server again. 

Clean Up Remote VM Environment