Converting a VHD to a VHDX
In Windows Server 2012 / Windows 8 we have introduced a new virtual hard disk format called “VHDX”. There are a number of advantages to this format:
- Support for greater than 2TB disks
- Better performance for dynamic and differencing disks
- Better handling of different disk sector sizes
- And more…
But what if you have a collection of VHD files? Luckily, converting to a VHDX format is simple (though potentially time consuming). To do this – all you need to do is:
- Open the Hyper-V Manager
- Select Edit Disk… from the action pane (or from the Action menu)
- Click Next to get past the introduction page of the Edit Virtual Disk Wizard
- Enter the name and location of your existing VHD file on the Location page and click Next
- On the Choose Action page select Convert and then click Next
- On the Choose Disk Format page select VHDX and click Next
- Complete the rest of the wizard and select the options you want
This will then create a new VHDX file that is a copy of your existing virtual hard disk. You can actually use the same process to convert a VHDX file back to a VHD file (if you needed to move it to an earlier version of Windows).
Cheers,
Ben