Creating a new hard disk for a virtual machine
The need to add an additional hard drive is driven by the guest OS or the VM design requirements. As these design aspects are beyond the scope of this book, we will dive directly into the procedure of adding a hard drive to the VM. The virtual machine can be in a powered on state while we add the hard disk.
It will be beneficial to learn a few concepts before we discuss how to create a new hard disk for a virtual machine.
Virtual machine disk provisioning methods
The virtual machine disk (VMDK) can be provisioned using two different methods namely, thick provisioning and thin provisioning. Thick provisioning can be further categorized into lazy zeroed thick provisioning and eager zeroed thick provisioning.
Note
Zeroing is a process of writing zeroes—to the disk blocks corresponding to a VMDK, to make sure that the existing data in those blocks, if any, are not exposed via the new VMDK.
The thick provisioning methods are as follows:
Eager zeroed thick...
