Microsoft's Virtual PC is a free virtualization program that allows alternate operating systems to be installed. Configuring Microsoft Virtual PC is a similar process to configuring Hyper-V again specifying the generated VHD file as an existing disk. However, Microsoft Virtual PC has a 127GB disk size limit.
Unlike Virtual Box, for Microsoft Virtual PC and Microsoft Hyper-V you cannot change the virtual hardware options. If the virtual machine does not boot, you need to reconfigure the operating system boot options, drivers, and HAL.
Vhd Virtual Machine
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VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) and its successor VHDX are file formats representing a virtual hard disk drive (HDD). They may contain what is found on a physical HDD, such as disk partitions and a file system, which in turn can contain files and folders. They are typically used as the hard disk of a virtual machine, are built into modern versions of Windows, and are the native file format for Microsoft's hypervisor (virtual machine system), Hyper-V.
A Virtual Hard Disk allows multiple operating systems to reside on a single host machine. This method enables developers to test software on different operating systems without the cost or hassle of installing a second hard disk or partitioning a single hard disk into multiple volumes. The ability to directly modify a virtual machine's hard disk from a host server supports many applications, including:
The CHS formula in the VHD specification allows a maximum of 6553516255 sectors.[2] About 127 GiB is also the limit for VHDs in Windows Virtual PC.[9] For fewer than 655351663 sectors (about 31 GiB) the CHS-value in the VHD footer uses a minimum of H = 4 and a maximum of H = 16 heads with S = 17, 31, or 63 sectors per track. The CHS algorithm then determines C = (T/S)/H.[2] The specification does not discuss cases where the CHS value in the VHD footer does not match the (virtual) CHS geometry in the Master Boot Record of the disk image in the VHD. Microsoft Virtual Server (also Connectix derived) has this limitation using virtual IDE drivers but 2 TiB if virtual RAID or virtual SCSI drivers are used.
Virtual Hard Disk format was initially used only by Microsoft Virtual PC (and Microsoft Virtual Server). Later however, Microsoft used the VHD format[10] in Hyper-V, the hypervisor-based virtualization technology of Windows Server 2008. Microsoft also used the format in Complete PC Backup, a backup software component included with Windows Vista and Windows 7. In addition, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 include support for creating, mounting, and booting from VHD files.[11]
The Vista (or later) drive manager GUI supports a subset of the functions in the diskpart command line tool.[12] VHDs known as vdisk in diskpart can be created, formatted, attached (mounted), detached (unmounted), merged (for differencing VHDs), and compacted (for VHDs on an NTFS host file system). Compacting is typically a two step procedure, first unused sectors in the VHD are filled with zeros, and then diskpart can use the NTFS feature of sparse files to eliminate runs of zeros in the VHD[citation needed]. The virtual machine additions in older VPC versions and the virtual machine integration features in Windows Virtual PC contain precompact ISO images for the first step in supported guest systems.[13]
It is sometimes useful to modify a VHD file without booting an operating system. Hyper-V features offline VHD manipulation, providing administrators with the ability to securely access files within a VHD without having to instantiate a virtual machine. This provides administrators with granular access to VHDs and the ability to perform some management tasks offline.[16] The Windows Disk Management MMC plugin can directly mount a VHD file as a drive letter in Windows 7/Server 2008 and newer.
Virtual Floppy Disk (VFD) is a related file format used by Microsoft Virtual PC, Microsoft Automated Deployment Services and Microsoft Virtual Server 2005.[17][18][19] A VFD that contains an image of a 720 KB low-density, 1.44 MB high-density or 1.68 MB DMF 3.5-inch floppy disk can be mounted by Virtual PC.[17][19][20] Other virtual machine software such as VMWare Workstation and VMware Player can mount raw floppy images in the same way.[21]
Windows Virtual PC for Windows 7 (version 6.1) does not offer a user interface for manipulating virtual floppy disks; however, it still supports physical and virtual floppy disks via scripting.[22] Under Hyper-V, VFD files are usable through the VM settings for Generation 1 virtual machines. Generation 2 virtual machines do not emulate a floppy controller and do not support floppy disk images.
In virtualization, virtual disks are where guest operating systems are installed, making them the equivalent of traditional hard disks. Once a virtual machine has been installed with a virtual disk running a guest operating system, it is ready for use.
VDI, which stands for Virtual Disk Image, is the default disk format for the open-source Oracle VM VirtualBox, an actively developed, enterprise-class virtualization product. VirtualBox runs on macOS, Windows, Linux, and Solaris hosts, and supports various guest operating systems, including Windows, DOS, Linux, Solaris and OpenSolaris, OS/2 and OpenBSD. It supports even older Windows versions such as Windows 3.x, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003 and Vista, making it suitable for development work among companies that continue to provide backward-compatible support for software built around these operating systems.
If you are looking at using VirtualBox for your virtualization needs, you can pick from pre-built VMs at Oracle Tech Network. Since it is open-source, a wide range of support tools that can be used with the software is also available from the VirtualBox ecosystem.
While VDI is specific to VirtualBox, the software is also compatible with Microsoft VHD/VHDX and VMware VMDK. This means that VirtualBox can run images with these file extensions as well. Using the Virtual Media Manager, VirtualBox allows you to create and copy VDI, VHD/VHDX, and VMDK virtual hard disks.
While VirtualBox supports different virtual disk formats, it is not always possible to convert other formats to VDI. Devices are also required to have VirtualBox before they can be installed with a virtual disk.
The VHD and VHDX file format specifications have been made available to third parties and are thus widely supported by various virtualization platforms. Microsoft has even made Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) available to ensure easy creation of Windows images in VHD files. Also available are Microsoft PowerShell scripts that allow conversion of an existing virtual hard disk from dynamic to fixed and vice versa, from VHD to VHDX, or a pass-through disk to a virtual hard disk.
VMDK, or Virtual Machine Disk, is a previously proprietary virtual disk-drive format built specifically for VMware virtual appliances, including VMware Workstation, VMware Player and VMware Fusion. It has since become an open format and is now widely used across different virtualization platforms, including Hyper-V and VirtualBox.
Using VMware or Hyper-V, you can convert a physical hard disk installed with Windows, Linux or any other operating system to a virtual disk that you can then install on a VM. The conversion process varies by vendor. In the case of VirtualBox, the process can be complicated and is therefore not recommended, unless you are patient enough and have the requisite expertise.
For VMware, you can convert Windows and Linux PCs into VMs using the VMware vCenter Converter. Download the tool on the PC to be converted, click the Convert machine button, select the PC as the source, then choose VMware Workstation, VMware Player or VMware Fusion virtual machine as the destination. You can then use the generated VMDK file to install a VM with the operating system image on another PC.
Parallels Remote Application Server (RAS) supports VMware ESXi, VMware vCenter and Microsoft Hyper-V, among other hypervisors and virtualization technologies. As such, it supports multiple virtual disk formats, including VDI, VHD and VMDK.
VDI. Normally, Oracle VM VirtualBox uses its own container format for guest hard disks. This is called a Virtual Disk Image (VDI) file. This format is used when you create a new virtual machine with a new disk.
Fixed-size. If you create a fixed-size image, an image file will be created on your host system which has roughly the same size as the virtual disk's capacity. So, for a 10 GB disk, you will have a 10 GB file. Note that the creation of a fixed-size image can take a long time depending on the size of the image and the write performance of your hard disk.
Dynamically allocated. For more flexible storage management, use a dynamically allocated image. This will initially be very small and not occupy any space for unused virtual disk sectors, but will grow every time a disk sector is written to for the first time, until the drive reaches the maximum capacity chosen when the drive was created. While this format takes less space initially, the fact that Oracle VM VirtualBox needs to expand the image file consumes additional computing resources, so until the disk file size has stabilized, write operations may be slower than with fixed size disks. However, after a time the rate of growth will slow and the average penalty for write operations will be negligible.
Microsoft Azure has two types of virtual hard disks (VHDs): unmanaged and managed. When comparing Azure managed vs. unmanaged disks, the biggest difference is that the latter are maintained by the end user in their own storage accounts.
The steps for attaching additional data disks from the Azure portal are the same for both Windows and Linux machines, and is covered earlier in the blog. You can follow the steps below to mount an attached Azure disk to a Linux VM. 2ff7e9595c
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