1.3 Overview

The virtual hard disk v2 (VHDX) file format provides features at the virtual hard disk as well as virtual hard disk file layers and is optimized to work well with modern storage hardware configurations and capabilities.

The VHDX format is designed to support three types of virtual hard disks:

• Fixed Virtual Hard Disk: A virtual hard disk file that is allocated to the size of the virtual hard disk and does not change when data is added or removed from the virtual hard disk. For example, for a virtual hard disk that is 1 GB in size, the virtual hard disk file is approximately 1 GB and will not grow or shrink in size as data is added or deleted.

• Dynamic Virtual Hard Disk: A virtual hard disk file that at any given time is as large as the actual data written to it, plus the size of its internal metadata. As more data is written, the file dynamically increases in size by allocating more space. For example, for a 2-GB virtual hard disk, the size of the virtual hard disk file, initially, is around 2 MB. As data is written to this virtual hard disk, the payload size grows in predetermined blocks to a maximum size of 2 GB.

• Differencing Virtual Hard Disk: A virtual hard disk file that represents the current state of the virtual hard disk as a set of modified blocks in comparison to a parent virtual hard disk file.
  
  Any new write to the virtual disk is captured in the latest child virtual hard disk. A read to a virtual disk offset is satisfied by looking for that virtual offset on the latest child virtual hard disk and traversing all the way to the parent if needed.
  
  This mechanism is used to create point-in-time snapshots of disks for backups and other scenarios. The differencing virtual hard disk, in order to be a fully functional file, depends on another virtual hard disk file. The parent hard disk file can be any of the mentioned virtual hard disk types, including another differencing virtual hard disk file.

Figure 1: Logical layout

Figure 2: File layout example