Virtual Machines are great. I rely on them for my work every day and most of my home office network depends on several Virtual Machines (VM’s) for the core infrastructure (SMTP, DNS, AD, backup management, centralized automation, build farms, continuous integration, etc.) but sometimes you just want the abstraction and ease of use of a Virtual Machine while having full support of the host’s hardware (graphics cards, drivers, etc.) and often you don’t want to mess around with the, often complex or entangled, multi-boot scenarios. If you’re in need of that, Windows 7 (and 2008 Server R2) and their native support for Virtual Harddisks (VHD’s) will come in extremely handy. Especially now that you can install and boot your system from a VHD, directly. The following is a bit of a quick start to using VHD’s, some additional details on how I’ve been using them, and a quick look at Starwind’s free V2V conversion application.
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