Windows 7 new VHD support , anyone using ?

[Modelworks]

Windows 7 shipped with the ability to boot the pc from VHD files directly. That means you could have a pc with no OS installed and only run OS withint VHD files.

n Windows® 7, a VHD can be used as the running operating system on designated hardware without any other parent operating system, virtual machine, or hypervisor. You can use the Windows 7 disk management tools (the DiskPart command-line tool and the Disk Management MMC snap-in) to create a VHD file. You can deploy a Windows 7 image (in .wim format) to the VHD, and you can copy the VHD file to multiple systems. You can configure the Windows 7 boot manager for a native or physical boot of the Windows image that is contained in the VHD. Furthermore, you can connect the VHD file to a virtual machine for use with the Hyper-V role in Windows Server 2008 R2. Native-boot VHD files are not designed or intended to replace full-image deployment on all client or server systems. Previous versions of Windows do not support a native boot from a VHD, and they require a hypervisor and virtual machine to boot from a VHD file.

A guide for how to do it is here:
http://www.windows7hacker.com/index.php/2009/05/native-vhd-boot-to-windows-7/

Curious if anyone is using the new bootable VHD support in win7 and what your experience are ? Anything that I should watch out for ? incompatibilities with applications etc ?

 

[Emulex]

do they support thin provisioning yet? one would hope so.

i love single (per drive) files for vmware. actually 2-4 files are nice because you can dispatch i/o threads against them.

win8 just needs to force compression and massive dedupe into the core vhd container. we've got enough power for it nowadays.

 

[RebateMonger]

win8 just needs to force compression and massive dedupe into the core vhd container. we've got enough power for it nowadays.

I always wondered why compression and encryption aren't done on hard drives via a hardware chip. It'd be done completely transparently. One "minor" issue would be like the situation with tape drives, where the actual capacity of the tapes was variable depending upon the type of data being stored.

 

[Nothinman]

I always wondered why compression and encryption aren't done on hard drives via a hardware chip. It'd be done completely transparently. One "minor" issue would be like the situation with tape drives, where the actual capacity of the tapes was variable depending upon the type of data being stored.

I believe that was one of the original uses envisioned for TPM chips, but it never happened. Of course then the encryption keys would be tied to the motherboard holding the TPM chip.

Like tapes they'd probably just list them like they do tapes with the native storage size and an "up to" double size, which would probably piss people off when they bought a "1TB/2TB" drive and it only held 900G because they filled it with uncompressable videos.

Another "minor" issue would be lock-in and compatibility. We've already got confusion about what drives, drivers, OSes, firmware, etc support TRIM so imagine if we added compression and encryption to the list of optional features. Depending on how they're implemented it could be very difficult to impossible to move a drive to another machine for use or recovery because of the encryption.

Frankly I'd rather trust encryption and compression to the filesystem layer since it's device independent and I know that any other similar OS installation can read it.

 

[WinOutreach]

There is an excellent Windows 7 VHD boot demonstration on the Springboard Site on TechNet found http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dd758779.aspx . It also discusses limitations for VHD boot, such as the lack of BitLocker support or hibernation.
Brandon
Windows Outreach Team- IT Pro