Question

While creating a virtual hard drive, suppose you select dynamically allocated hard drive.

• Discuss the pros and cons of this choice.

Now after this you are asked to do the same with the fixed size option.

• How does this affect the creation of hard drive in some aspects and the overall performance of our system being installed?
• Also discuss the pros and cons of such installation

Please use more than 250 words

Answer 1

A VHD or Virtual Hard Disk is used to allow multiple operating systems to operate together on the same partition of a hard drive on a single machine.

A Virtual Hard Disk is dynamically allocated when the disk space needs to be conserved and takes less time to get created than fixed-size. A dynamically allocated VHD occupies very little space after an operating system is installed on it, as any unused virtual disk sector will not occupy any hard disk space. As new files are written for the first time to a disk sector, the size of a dynamically allocated VHD will grow, until it reaches it's maximum capacity chosen at the time of creation. However due to the overhead encountered while expanding the image file of the operating system on it due to which read/write operations might be slower. But this penalty is negligible when the maximum capacity has been allocated.

A fixed-size VHD takes a longer time to create due to the allocation of the maximum capacity chosen at the time of creation. Depending on the maximum capacity set it may take quite a long time to get created.Since all the space is allocated at the beginning, it has to incur less overhead after installation of an operating system and therefore is slightly faster than dynamically allocated VHD.