Windows Sandbox is a new lightweight desktop environment tailored for safely running applications in isolation.
How many times have you downloaded an executable file, but were afraid to run it?...
Updated Dec 12, 2022
Version 11.0
Blog Post
This Sandbox is very interesting, but without possibility to persist changes to virtual machine it is not nearly as useful as it could be.
It could become much more useful if option is added to keep machine state after restart, something like <GuestFolder>c:\somewhere</GuestFolder> , and if present then Windows Sandbox would start from files in that folder( if they do not exists it create working files there like it normally do now ) , and on shutdown if option was present then Windows Sandbox would not delete those files.
Someone could argue that we could use Hyper_V virtual machine if we want changes to persist on restart, but Windows Sandbox have two very important advantages currently:
- light disk footprint : it reuse OS files from host
- much better GPU performance: graphic virtualization on Sandbox allows it to have less than half performance of host GPU on benchmarks I tried (55%), while standard Hyper-V can not even run those 3D benchmarks. Comparatively, VMWare workstation can run those benchmarks , but five times slower than host GPU (18%).
Hopefully, in future, there will be an option to persist changes across VM restarts.