Virtual Hard Disk -- Why chosen?

Hello Jgillin,

You have a valid query, Assume what if you want to run multiple OS at one time, or you want to test some application on different platforms or software environment. To solve this you actually need multiple physial Pcs.

The original purpose of Virtual PC or Virtual Server is to virtualize hardware and simulate running multiple machines on your physical PC without having multiple physical PCs. Means you can have multiple .Vhds configured in your PC and can take advantage of what all you could do on multiple physical PCs.

Virtual PC or Virtual server are used to vertualize hardware among the multiple running images (.vhd), Means the virtual image will share the physical RAM, Hard-disk etc and this is why we call it virtual. At one point of time someone can have upto 255 images running, if system hardware resources allow to do so.

The reason of using virtual image to a developer would be that the .vhd image is the pre-configured image which comes with all the softwares installed on it, you just download it and start working.

1. Assue what if you were to install all the required software and it will take a lot of time., so you are getting an image all the software pre-installed on it.
2. As technology is in Pre-release/CTP form; if it comes with some bugs or faults which may affect/crash your OS or any other softawre, the whole virtual environment (.vhd) is isolated and will not affect your host OS and softwares, as you can discard it any time.

As the Virtual image requires another image known as Base image which consists of Operating System(Base01a in case of ORCAS common to all the CTP releases and one time download), and the other image consists of softwares. Likewise in a physical PC we have an OS and then at the top of it we install softawres.

FYI - Correct image of ORCAS March 2007 CTP is availble at this link
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=B533619A-0008-4DD6-9ED1-47D482683C78&displaylang=en

Hope you will find it useful.

Thanks and Regards

VidyaVratAgarwal at 2007-9-7 >

Anyways, one piece of feedback I thought I'd give is that the process of "Merging" the virtual hard disk with the base (Base01.vhd) can be a very long process (30 + minutes), so just let it do it's thing and go do something else for a while.

jgillin at 2007-9-7 >