Is anyone using VMs, VHDs or VHDXs instead of disk images?

I am playing with VMs, VHDs and VHDXs to learn about the technology. My Acer laptop was too lowly specced to run VMs but my Acemagic is fine. But I find a native boot VHD works very well on my Acer. I realise Macrium and Hasleo have many features which are useful such as delta restore, verification and compression.

I combine them by using Macrium to restore to a new VHD(X).

I wondered if virtualisation might replace disk imaging. What do you think?

I don't think there is a compression option with VHDs... space may still be a consideration for many users.

I think @Bree does this. I've done it here and there, but with so many computers lying around, I don't have much need for it currently.

kelper said:

I am playing with VMs, VHDs and VHDXs to learn about the technology. My Acer laptop was too lowly specced to run VMs but my Acemagic is fine. But I find a native boot VHD works very well on my Acer. I realise Macrium and Hasleo have many features which are useful such as delta restore, verification and compression.

I combine them by using Macrium to restore to a new VHD(X).

I wondered if virtualisation might replace disk imaging. What do you think?

Click to expand...

Virtual Machines will always be slower than host installations as there is the overhead of running the virtual machines.

At best, on my medium range device, a vm in HyperV runs about 70% of host speed. Other tools like vmware or virtualbox barely reach 50%>

Using vhdx's as host native boot installations is not virtualisation - all that is going on is instead of a physical drive holding the host OS, it is stored on a (virtual) emulated disk. The OS still runs on the host.

There is a slight overhead in performance as the OS needs to decipher the emulated disk. However with modern pcs and ssd/nvmes, the performance overhead is slight. The performance loss is less than 2% on my device.

Using a virtual hard hard drive as a backup rather than an image backup, whilst doable, is decidely inefficient and wastes storage space.

VHDXs have a significant issue inasmuch if files are deleted to save space, the files are deleted but the underlying space in the vhdx is not (easily) freed and eventually the vhdx file gets filled up even though its nominal size is greater than the data in the vhdx file).

Native boot vhdx files are great for dual/multi booting Insider versions along side a native host OS.

Also, I have found vhdx files can get corrupted now and then (rare but do happen now and then) but image backups from Macrium Reflect (and to be fair most well known image backup tools) are very robust.

I have never had a corrupted image with Macriun Reflect in over 15 years.

Part of this is due to the fact that imaging tools are designed with handshsking backup verification etc., when backing up and as a post backup check as well if selected.

So basically native boot vhdxs have their uses but I would not regard then as a substitution for conventional image backups.

I don't mind if virtual OSs are slower and that was not my question. I was asking if people used them INSTEAD of disk images. Sorry, did not want to come across as rude.

pseymour said:

I think @Bree does this.

Click to expand...

Yes, I certainly do.....

Froggie said:

I don't think there is a compression option with VHDs... space may still be a consideration for many users.

Click to expand...

If you create a fixed size vhdx then the file is as large as the size you chose for the disk. If you create a dynamic .vhdx then it is only the size of the data it contains. The five .vhdx files for the menu above are all 64GB virtual drives, That would require 320GB if they were all fixed size vhdx. But as dynamic vhdx they only occupy about 30GB each, a total 163GB.



Important: While native booting a vhdx it will expand to its full size (64GB in my case) while the OS is running from it, and return to its smaller size when the OS is shut down. It is important, therefore, to always leave enough free space for one vhdx to expand to its full size at the time it is the boot drive.