VHDX: The New Wave in Virtual Hard Disk Formats
A bit about VHDs Virtual hard disk or VHD is a way to provide storage medium for virtual machines, which is represented as a disk image in file format. Operating system for virtual machine is installed in VHD for it to store data within. VHDs can be of two types. 1. Fixed size 2. Dynamic size Getting to know VHDX: Windows server 2012 has introduced new Virtual hard drive file format named as VHDX for Hyper-V 3.0, which eliminates limitations posed by earlier VHD format. VHDX offers benefits like better performance, reliability and enhanced storage capacity. A VHDX file is divided in 3 sections. 1. Fixed size header 2. Non-overlapping objects 3. Free spaces Header is always at the start of VHDX image, whereas the objects and free space are intermixed randomly. All objects are 1MB aligned, named as BAT (Block allocation table), metadata, header, log, payload block and sector bitmap block. VHDX supports 3 types of disks: 1. Fixed size 2. Dynamic siz...