A virtual hard disk is a file used to store data for a computer that acts like a physical drive. They can be used for storing boot files, applications and operating systems. Virtual drives can be mounted and accessed through Disk Management or Windows Explorer. They can also be backed up and restored as needed. They can be moved between computers and even between platforms.
There are different types of virtual disks available in ME5. Workloads that generate high disk I/O experience better performance with a fixed VHD. A dynamic disk starts out at a specified size and grows as the VM writes to it. This type of virtual disk provides storage flexibility but can result in higher CPU utilization if the disk is very large. The third disk type is called a differencing disk and stores changes to an existing parent virtual disk in a separate file referred to as the child image. The child image can be merged into the parent virtual disk, or it can be deleted to undo the changes.
Whether you are using an on-premises environment or in the cloud, there are many considerations when selecting a storage solution for your applications and data. Both Amazon EFS and Google’s Filestore are distributed object storage technologies that utilize the Network File System (NFS).
Both services offer different capabilities in terms of throughput, IOPS and latency. Amazon EFS utilizes the newer NFSv4 protocol, which has been shown to provide performance capabilities of 10 GB/sec and over 500,000 IOPS. While Filestore uses the older NFSv3 protocol, with a maximum capability of 16 GB/sec and 480,000 IOPS.
