22 June 2005

Differencing Disk walkthrough under Virtual PC

Although I don't myself use Differencing Disks a great deal for my test environments (mainly as I spent a while building set of about eight finely tuned VMs serving my needs for just about every demonstration), they are a great feature of Virtual Server and Virtual PC. One day, I'll go through the steps to use differencing disks, if for no other reason than to get all eight VMs to fit on a single DVD - now that would be cool.

I stumbled across a walkthrough of setting up a VM using a differencing disk here. Worth a read if you get a chance. The one thing which I think should be added is to remember to mark the parent disk as read only (by ACL as well if you're paranoid to really make sure). This is such a common mistake by many and so, so important. If you accidentally were to change the parent, you would render any children unusable.

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# Nick said:
Differencing Disks are definitely worth checking out. I have a short write-up on this, along with instructions in a recent blog posting I did - http://addicted-to-it.blogspot.com/2005/06/virtual-pc-using-differencing-disks-to.html .

The only downside, as I see it is they're kinda of clunky to manage; I end up tagging each VHD with an ascii file explaining why the purpose of that particular VHD. VMware recently added a little wizard that adds a few features, and basically helps you to keep track of this the different images.
22 June 05 at 8:20 AM
# Matt said:
Thanks for the tip... I've updated the artice :)
22 June 05 at 8:29 AM
# Fraser Dickson said:
I recently started using differencing disks in VPC 2004 myself.

This article will be very useful in istructing my collegues how to do the same with their Virtual Machines!

Thanks very much!
22 June 05 at 10:30 AM

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