Submitted by Ondrej Vysek – Blog: optimalizovane-IT Bored with updating multiple Windows images in a single WIM file? Bored with checking for new updates and installing patches from Windows Update? Don’t want to patch every VHD file manualy? Imagepatcher is a script that allows you to automate the whole process.

The script detects all required updates for Windows 7 / Windows Server 2008 R2 (sorry no Vista and Windows Server 2008 support), downloads the updates and patches all or selected images in the wim file. Imagepatcher can also mount a VHD file and patch it offline. No longer do you have to check for updates and  spend many hours with manual patching every Patch Tuesday. You can use the downloaded patches with MDT as well.

imagepatcher

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Have you ever wondered why it takes so long to create a fixed virtual hard disk (VHD) in Hyper-V or Virtual Server 2005? The Virtual PC Guy dealt with this issue in a blog post. The reason is that the hard disk space assigned to the VHD is wiped out. This is just as if you are using a tool like Active@ Kill Disk to make sure that deleted data can’t ever be recovered again. The process is so time-consuming because every byte on the disk has to be overwritten.

It is unnecessary to zero out dynamically growing disks, because they only occupy disk space when they actually write data to disk, thereby erasing all the data still stored on the corresponding hard disk sectors. Fixed virtual disks already occupy the hard disk’s space before the virtual machine writes data on it. Therefore, if you don’t wipe out the data on the disk, it is possible to recover data that has been stored on the hard disk before the space was assigned to the VHD.

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I guess there are many IT shops these days that migrate from VMware ESX or VMware Server to Microsoft’s Hyper-V. I believe this trend will continue as soon as Hyper-V 2 for Windows Server 2008 R2 is available. Unfortunately, VMware and Microsoft use different formats for their virtual disk images. VMware virtualization solutions use the Virtual Machine Disk Format (VMDK) and Microsoft uses the Virtual Hard Disk Format (VHD).

The free Vmdk2Vhd tool can help you convert a VHD image into VMDK format. Note that it is recommended to convert a big VMDK file to multiple 2GB VMDK spanned files first. Jérôme Laban has described some other issues you might encounter.

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As its name indicates, VHD Resizer is a tool that allows you to resize a VHD (Virtual Hard Disk). VHD is Microsoft’s format for virtual disks, and is used by Virtual PC, Virtual Server, and Hyper-V. VHD Resizer can be used to enlarge or shrink virtual disks of all three virtualization solutions. Windows Vista and Windows 7’s system backup tools also use this format. However, it doesn’t make much sense to enlarge a backup image. There are also third party virtualization tools, such as VirtualBox, that support the VHD format.

The most common problem with VHDs occurs when the disk of a virtual server is full. The nice thing about virtual disks is that they are quite easy to expand. I can’t help but wonder why Microsoft’s virtualization solutions haven’t integrated this option. In theory, this should be possible even while the server is running. After all, it is no problem to defragment the disk of a running server, so why shouldn’t it be possible to resize an online VHD?

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