How-To: Virtual hard disk (Expandable/Fixed)

[Andreas_Masur]

Just realized that Beta 3 also addresses one thing that was more tricky to accomplish before....the usage of fixed-size virtual hard disk for the VM. There is now an option named 'Allocate all disk space now' provided while setting up a VM. Check it to have a fixed-size hard disk, uncheck it to have an expandable one (see attached screenshot)...

[Pat_Lee]

Glad you found this. We added these options for the power user, but hide them by default for the typical consumer user. It is also nice to able to add an existing virtual disk in the same place in the assistant.

Pat

[admin]

The part of that screen I'm most psyched about is the checkbox for "Split disk into 2GB files." It seems like a lot of Mac folks want to put their virtual machines on externally connected drives with FAT file systems. FAT, unlike the Mac OS X file system or NTFS, misbehaves on large files, so splitting the hard disk into many smaller physical pieces makes life better.

In case anybody is wondering: the operating system inside the VM is totally oblivious to the difference. As far as it is concerned, it just has a disk of a certain size.