You can't get the VMs to pass WGA so they are only good for 30 days before they have to be reset; which pretty much makes them only good for testing / qa purposes.

This seems like a very reasonable decision on Microsoft's part: they make it easier / legal / quick to test on their platform and more people will support and develop on it.

I dunno, it could be useful for a number of things.

For example, I know a few online banking solutions that are IE-only. The most you need there might be a certificate, so resetting the vm every 30 days isn't such a big deal.

I try to keep the VMs as small as possible anyhow and if you need data, you keep it in a VM shared folder that you map in the Windows guest.

Don't worry I'm sure some bean counter crunched the numbers and they decided it was an acceptable risk.

I mean, if you want a fully functional pirated version that doesn't expire every 30 days and you never have to activate you don't exactly have to look very hard, or far.

By reset do you mean they have to be redownloaded?

Per the docs: "A snapshot is automatically taken upon install, allowing rollback to the pristine virtual environment configuration."

You can just roll back to that snapshot at the end of your 30 days and everything will continue to be usable.