What is the difference between VHD and virtual disk?

Question

I am studying for MCSA and have got myself so confused. What is the difference if any?

score 5 · Answer 1 · edited Mar 20 '17 at 10:16

VHD is a HDD image file format, virtual disk is a device.

There are many formats for virtual HDD images and VHD is just one of them (VirtualBox uses VDI, VMware has VMDK etc.). These are images, not devices.

Virtual disk is a device that doesn't exist physically, so an emulated (or virtualised) HDD, CD-ROM or something like that.

In some contexts VHD and virtual disk can be synonymous, but if you're pedantic then these two are competely different things. It's like saying that JPEG is a photo - JPEG isn't a photo, it's a compression algorithm used in EXIF files that can be used to compress photos.

score 2 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 28 '13 at 20:54

I will tell you that one has three letters and one has eleven; Seriously, VHD stands for Virtual Hard Disk/Drive, they are one in the same. There are differences with how each vendor creates/implements them, but since your studying for the mcsa it's safe to so it's likely talking about MS technology unless the book/exam specifically says otherwise. The difference between a VHD and a physical drive is that the VHD is just a file that sits on a physical drive, but to a virtual machine appears as a physical drive. There is also software that can make a vhd appear as a physical drive to a regular workstation, enabling you to operate on it as if it were a real disk, without having to attach it to a virtual machine.

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 28 '13 at 20:54

1

A VHD is a virtual disk. VHD is short for virtual hard disk.

answered Mar 28 '13 at 20:54

Pretzel

466

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Jan 19 '18 at 13:09

0

A VHD is a Virtual Hard Drive and is a file that emulates a hard drive. A virtual disk is a collection of physical disk space from one or more physical disk that appear as one physical disk.

answered Jan 19 '18 at 13:09

gordon

11

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 03 '18 at 08:43

I found this question looking for the same answer, but in terms of Powershell commandlets. There is a difference and it seems to be:

PS commandlets using VirtualDisk (New-VirtualDisk) work within StoragePools.

IE: Use New-VirtualDisk to create a virtual disk within a StoragePool.

PS commandlets using VHD (New-VHD) work with VHD & VHDX files.

IE: Use New-VHD to create a virtual disk (VHD or VHDX) file.

score -1 · Answer 6 · answered Jun 03 '23 at 01:51

Get some rest and stop over thinking everything. They had to name everything you connect to or physically plug in to, so when a drive pops up from a camera through the wifi or a USB drive it gets a name virtual because it's not physically installed into the motherboard. Hopefully this helps

What is the difference between VHD and virtual disk?

6 Answers6