That begs the question, what about Windows Deployment Services and ConfigMgr OS deployment? I don’t see WDS and OSD going anywhere but MS are strongly hinting that they only want 1 disk format in the future. This gives us added flexibility, performance and drastically simplifies OS deployment. Now your VHD is on a dedicated server with all the performance that goes with it. What happens if we want the portability of VM’s but the power of a dedicated machine? Windows 2008 R2 allows us to have a small boot partition that surfaces (mounts) a VHD on another partition and boots from that. Normally, on a Hyper-V server we have lots of VM’s. MS has been using it for virtual machines since Virtual PC and Virtual Server and published the format for others to use and integrate with. VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) is a file that simulates a hard disk. Windows Server 2008 R2 adds some new Hyper-V based technology called Native VHD.
