It is possible to convert a dynamic virtual hard disk (VHD) to a fixed size VHD.\u00a0 I found myself doing this when I needed to migrate a machine from an R&D environment to production.\u00a0 Note that the VM (if the disk is attached to a VM) must be powered off to do this.<\/p>\n
If you use Hyper-V without Virtual Machine Manager 2008 then you can do this using the Hyper-V console.\u00a0 Edit the virtual machine in question (if applicable), select the disk and click on <EDIT>.\u00a0 Choose to convert the disk.\u00a0 You’ll then be asked where to place the new disk.\u00a0 Be wary here if you use dedicated volumes for each VM, e.g. in a Windows 2008 cluster.\u00a0 There may not be enough disk space in the existing disks volume for the new fixed sized disk that will be created – that’s correct; it doesn’t convert the disk, it creates a new one.\u00a0 Choose a suitable temporary location and name.\u00a0 For example, my VHD might be called Disk0.VHD and I’d convert to Disk0Full.vhd.\u00a0 When finished, I’d rename them, e.g. Disk0.VHD -> DiskDyn.VHD and Disk0Full.VHD -> Disk0.VHD.\u00a0 Swap the files and then restart the VM.<\/p>\n
It’s both easier and more complex using VMM.\u00a0 You can select the VM in question and select the disk.\u00a0 Tick the box for "Convert to Fixed Type Virtual Hard Disk" and apply the changes.\u00a0 A new job will start.\u00a0 This creates a new VHD in the same volume<\/em> as the existing VM.\u00a0 That’s a bit nasty.\u00a0 You tend to limit the size of the LUN in question to avoid wastage when using a cluster.\u00a0 So odds are, this will fail unless you’ve plenty of spare space in the LUN – remember the LUN will contain both the original dynamic disk and the converted fixed size disk for at least a short period of time.\u00a0 Temporarily increasing and decreasing the volume size should not be done, even if your SAN can do it … my testing phase showed that it corrupts the contents of the volume.\u00a0 The nice bit of this process is that all the file renaming and swapping is done for you.\u00a0 I just wish you could pick a temporary location for the file conversion process.\u00a0 That might<\/em> be possible using PowerShell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It is possible to convert a dynamic virtual hard disk (VHD) to a fixed size VHD.\u00a0 I found myself doing this when I needed to migrate a machine from an R&D environment to production.\u00a0 Note that the VM (if the disk is attached to a VM) must be powered off to do this. If you … Continue reading “Convert To Fixed Type Virtual Hard Disk”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hyper-v"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t