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13 Dell EMC SC Series: Microsoft Hyper-V Best Practices | CML1009
2.3 Virtual hard disks
A virtual hard disk (VHD) is a set of data blocks that is stored as a regular Windows file on the host system.
VHD files end with a .vhd, .vhdx or .vhds extension depending on the type of VHD. All VHD formats are
supported with SC Series storage.
Virtual hard disk file (vhdx) on a cluster shared volume
2.3.1 Virtual hard disk format
There are three different kinds of virtual hard disk formats that are supported with either VM generation:
• VHD is supported with all Hyper-V versions, but is limited to a maximum size of 2,048 GB.
• VHDX is supported with Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V and newer. The VHDX format offers better
resiliency in the event of a power loss, better performance, and supports a maximum size of 64 TB.
VHD files can be converted to the VHDX format using tools such as Hyper-V Manager or PowerShell.
• VHDS (or VHD Set) is supported on Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V and newer. VHDS is for virtual
hard disks that are shared by two or more guest VMs in support of clustering (high-availability)
configurations.
Different formats available for virtual hard disks