Native Support for Virtual Hard Disks in Windows 7

Martin | May 23, 2008 | Comments 2

A recent job offering at the Microsoft website revealed a new feature unintentionally that will be available in Windows 7. Microsoft is looking for a Software Development Engineer in Test that is supporting the engineering team that is bringing virtualization to Windows 7.

Do you want to join the team that is bringing virtualization into the mainstream? In Windows 7, our team will be responsible for creating, mounting, performing I/O on, and dismounting VHDs (virtual hard disks) natively. Imagine being able to mount a VHD on any Windows machine, do some offline servicing and then boot from that same VHD. Or perhaps, taking an existing VHD you currently use within Virtual Server and boost performance by booting natively from it.

The big new feature is the native support for Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs) in Windows 7 which is the next logical step from Windows Vista’s Complete PC Backup feature and Hyper-V in Microsoft Windows Server 2008.

Virtualization technology has been a great success with Virtual Server and Hyper-V. With native OS support on the horizon it will become an even greater hit. Our team is making this a reality in Windows 7. Consider the simplicity of backup using a VHD, or the portability of a virtual disk backed by a single file. These are a few reasons why this technology is poised to be one of the greatest features in Windows 7–come help us achieve this goal.

That’s the first big new feature that has been announced officially by Microsoft although definitely unintentionally.