VHDTool – special sauce for VHD disks

Dear Reader, have you ever wished you could resize – grow – a fixed-sized VHD disk?

Earlier today I sure did. A couple of months ago I created a smallish fixed-size VHD file that I boot native into, to use as the “host” for running Hyper-V images. That’s all I used it for. Just to boot into it, then launch a Hyper-V image.

Worked great.

But, recently I thought, For my demos, wouldn’t it be great to run VS 2010 beta2 with SharePoint 2010 Beta in the boot native VHD host, and connect to the TFS server in the Hyper-V image?

Which meant installing Office 2007, VS 2010 beta 2, SharePoint 2010 Beta, etc, into my little bitty fixed VHD disk. It all installed, but there wasn’t room for anything else. Let’s say the VHD was busting at the seams.

Fixed size VHD = super fast. But, Fixed means FIXED, right? Can’t grow it.

Not necessarily. Ben Armstrong and his VHD team to the rescue. They’ve created a sweet utility called VHDTool that will allow you to manipulate a VHD file. One of the things it does is it allows you to expand a fixed-size VHD disk.

Insanely perfect!!!

I  made a backup of the VHD, downloaded the utility, ran it with fingers crossed, and gave my VHD an extra 10GB. It finished within seconds. Lightning fast!

And it worked as advertised. Sweetness!

What else can it do? Create, convert, extend, and repair. Neat-o.

Check out Ben’s blog post about it: https://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2009/03/25/quick-fixed-vhd-creation-tool.aspx