Creating the Virtual PC Hard Disks

Now I am ready to create the blank virtual PC Hard Disks that will be used by all the virtual machines. To do this Go to the Virtual Disks Section of the Virtual Server Admin web page. Go to the create menu and select Dynamically Expanding Virtual Hard disk. I select dynamic for the base disks even though you can get better performance with fixed size disks. I can always change them to fixed size later and this way I save disk space until it is needed.

This opens a dialog box titled Dynamically Expanding Virtual Hard Disk. If you click on the Location: drop down list box you get D:\Virtual Machines as one of the locations available. In the virtual hard disk file name: text box I enter the path to the disk file in this case that is D:\Shared Virtual Machines\Hard Disks\BaseOSDisk.vhd since I am creating the BaseOSDisk and want to create a new Hard Disks folder for the file.

Next I create a DataDisk. The data disk will hold all installs etc that are not part of the primary OS. I have it mainly to support cluster configurations. It will be named DataDisk.vhd.

Next I will create a quorum disk for those machines I want to cluster. Note this is not required for all machines but I might as well get it out of the way now. So create a new hard disk, pick the Location and give it the file name D:\Shared Virtual Machines\Hard \QuorumDisk.vhd.

Finally I create three disks for raid support. This disks are available for when I want to have a software raid array. Not many situations where this occurs but still cool to play with. There are named RaidDisk0, RaidDisk1, and Raiddisk2.

With that I have all the virtual disks I need created. Next I will create the Base Machine configuration and finally I will actually install the OS into the Base Machine and add drivers and MachineAdditions. Then I will show how to use sysprep to easily clone over the base machine.