Saving Disk Space using VPC - differencing virtual disk

Dear all, during this sharing session, we would like to share on how to make your Virtual Machine file small. This is important for most of our customers, especially keeping all those big VM files for the testlab...

To do this, what you can do is, create a base Operating System, eg: Setup a Windows 2003 Ent with all the Service Packs installed.

There is something call differencing virtual disk in VPC where you can build your machine via a base OS, ya, it is COOL.

Below are the steps we would like to share:
1) Create one OS based, which OS installed and patched.
2) Create a second VM where act as the second VM. once you reach creating disk side, in the Virtual Disk Wizard dialog box, click Next.
3) In the Disk Options dialog box, click Create a new virtual disk, and then click Next.
4) In the Virtual Disk Type dialog box, click A virtual hard disk, and then click Next. By default, the wizard creates the virtual hard disk in the My Documents folder. If you want to store the virtual hard disk in a different location, type the full path of this location when you specify the virtual hard disk name.
5) In the Virtual Hard Disk Location dialog box, type a name for the virtual hard disk, and then click Next.
6) In the Virtual Hard Disk Type dialog box, click Differencing, and then click Next. In the Differencing Virtual Hard Disk dialog box, type the name of the parent disk or click Browse to find it, this is the location where you put in your based OS .VHD file.
7) click Next, and then click Finish.

At the end of the day, the VPC will only save the changes to the differencing disk, not the based OS. You can then use this method with only one based OS.

Saving space? Of course!