Creating virtual hard disks–the slow way
Over the weekend I reconfigured one of my main servers. As part of this process – I had to make some large fixed virtual hard disks (800-1600GB in size). This took a long time…
I spent quite some a while looking at this screen…
In the past I have talked about why this takes a long time and I have also talked about a tool that is available that can make fixed virtual hard disks quickly. So you may be wondering why I would still create virtual hard disks the slow way.
Well – there are two reasons:
- Support. I know that all of our testing is done using virtual hard disks created by Hyper-V – not by any other tools. This means that I can have high confidence in the fact that I am unlikely to have problems with these disks – and that if I do have any problems, we will fix them.
- Reliability. I like to know that every sector of the disk has been touched before I put it into production. For the same reason, I always do a full (not quick) format of a disk before putting real workload on it. I have personally had the experience of having a system where everything appeared to be fine – but creating a 200GB fixed virtual hard disk (the slow way) would cause the system to crash; which in turn revealed that there was a bug in the disk driver I was using.
In my opinion – when it comes to production systems, sometimes it is just worth taking the time to do things properly.
Cheers,
Ben