Chapter 5 - Virtual Disks

Abstract

Virtual Server provides its virtual machines with several types of disks. It emulates disks, which are called virtual disks. To a guest operating system inside a virtual machine, these virtual disks are the same as those in a physical machine. These disks can be categorized as either removable disks or hard disks. Removable disks can be CD/DVD disks or floppy disks. These disks can be used through their emulated disk drive. Virtual Server supports a virtual floppy disk drive per machine and multiple virtual CD/DVD drives. Both can be attached to a host drive or can use an image file like a virtual floppy disk or ISO 9660 ISO file. A Virtual hard disk is virtualized disk storage in a virtual machine. On the host, a virtual hard disk is just a file. Depending on the type of disk, this file has different characteristics. The dynamically expanding virtual hard disk is expanded as needed; Virtual Server expands the file upon write requests when space in the file is insufficient. The fixed-size virtual hard disk is a file on the host that is of the same size as the logical size.