Windows 8:- Virtual Hard Disk Enhancement (VHDX)

In today post, let look into Virtual Hard Disk Enhancement. For those who are familiar with current Hyper-V, you will realize that you can create a Virtual Hard Disk with the format .vhd. With .VHD, you can scale up to 2TB and this is the limit. To support more than 2 TB, then you need to use pass-through disk.

With Windows Developer Preview Edition, you can now scale more than 2 TB and up to the limit 16TB with the new virtual hard disk format :- .vhdx.

On my lab environment, i have tested convert Centos VHD and Windows guest operating system to VHDX. It is running quite well without any problem. Either setup a new VM or perform a conversion from

a) VHD to VHDX
b) VHDX to VHD

Both are working fine. The new format VHDX provide a better improvement in term of performance, larger block size and is more resilient to corruption.

Bear in mind that, you can only use VHDX on Windows Developer Preview Edition or later edition and not in earlier version of Hyper-V. Therefore don't export the VM and expect the earlier version of Hyper-V will boot up VHDX...

At this moment the VHDX limit is still 16TB. May be this number will increase..i dunno... Let wait and see when the product has release in Beta version.