Understanding virtual disks

This section focuses first on the terms we should be familiar with to build on our understanding of virtual disks.

After we've agreed on terms, we'll explore virtual disk configuration options that we saw in Chapter 4, Creating a Virtual Machine, but did not explore: virtual disk image formats,bus/interface options, and disk cache options.

Coming to terms

Secondary storage is as integral to virtual machines as it is to physical computers. While hard disk drives (HDDs) are hardly the most expensive hardware in PCs, we could compellingly argue that they are the most valuable, so far as we rely on them to store and provide access to our data, often the unique fruit of our hard labor.

Throughout this chapter, the term Virtual Disk will refer to a file or set of files that, to a virtual machine, represent a hard disk drive and behave just as a physical hard disk drive or solid-state drive (SSD) does for a physical computer.

The similarities between a physical hard disk...