Software Support
Virtual Hard Disk format was initially used only by Microsoft Virtual PC. Later however, Microsoft used the VHD format 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.
The Vista (or later) drive manager GUI supports a subset of the functions in the diskpart command line tool. 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. 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.
Third-party products also use VHD file format. VirtualBox, part of Sun xVM line of Sun Microsystems supports VHD in versions 2 and later. VMware ESX Server and VMware Workstation also support the VHD file format as an alternative to its proprietary VMDK format. The VHD file format is also adopted by XenSource for what is now the Citrix XenServer hypervisor.
Read more about this topic: VHD (file Format)
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