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Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Different types of disk in Hyper V

With Hyper V, you have several options to select different types of disk for the virtual machine. You can choose

a) Pass- through disk
Suitable to use on production environment and best for application / resource which is resource extensive such as Exchange Server, SQL server, etc
For more detail, please refer to my previous article:-
http://www.ms4u.info/2009/07/hyper-v-pass-through-disk.html

b) Fixed disk
Another alternative than pass through disk. Also suitable for production environment which is medium type of resouce extensive application. One of the limitation is you need to allocate fixed hard disk size for each VM. It can occupy a lot of your hard disk space and the size does not change when you add / delete data.

c) Dynamic disk
Suitable for test environment/less extensive application. The initial hard disk size is small and will grow when more data is added in.

d) Differencing disk
Suitable for testing and training environment. This type of disk need to associate with a parent disk which has set to read only. Any new changes, will be added to this diferential disk without impact to the parent disk.

Choose wisely on the type of disk before setup a virtual machine...Cheer, ericlaiys