Hyper V storage

Hyper-V storage

The New Virtual Machine Wizard presents different options for Generation 1 vs. Generation 2 VMs.

• Generation 1 VMs provide two IDE controllers, which host the hard drive and a DVD drive, and an unpopulated SCSI controller which can host additional disks.
• Generation 2 VMs, however, have only a single SCSI controller, which hosts all virtual drives.

A new VHD can be created using

• Hyper-V Manager through the New Virtual Hard Disk Wizard
• Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc), however the option to create a differencing disk is not available, nor can specific block or sector size be specified
• PowerShell

Shared virtual disk files are preferably created as VHD sets. Pass-through disks make exclusive use of a physical disk. ^pwsh

Standard checkpoints (previously known as "snapshots" in Windows Server 2012 and before) with the extensions AVHD or AVHDX save the state, data, and hardware configuration of a VM. They are recommended for development and testing but are not a replacement for backup software nor recommended for production environmentsj, because restoring them in a production environment will interrupt running services. Production checkpoints do not save memory state, but use Volume Shadow Copy Service (Windows) or File System Freeze (Linux) inside the guest to create "point in time" images of the VM.