How to Share a Parent Disc with child discs on Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V

One problem I have using Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V that I didn’t using VPC was the ability to point the differencing discs to one parent.

This is a trick I use to share one Parent disc with multiple child discs within Hyper-V is to use a Hardlink. On an NTFS fiel system all files have one Hardlink, which is the one you see when a file is created. NTFS allows a single file to have multiple Hardlinks in different directories.

A using FSUTIL HARDLINK CREATE, you create an entry in adirectory that points to the original file in another directory (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc788097(WS.10).aspx), once created the file appears in the directory listing and behaves just like as is the file was created in that directory.

The other side feature is that the file is not deleted until all the hardlinks to it have been deleted, which means I’m not deleting the parent by mistake.