Microsoft discloses Virtual Hard Disk format details
Sunday, October 16, 2005
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Microsoft decided to make its VHD format available to third parties under a royalty-free license.
We already saw PlateSpin, in this post, and Acronis, in this post, moving to gain benefits from this choice.
More vendors will surely adapt their products to interact with the VHD format. The first category doing so will probably be antivirus, now eventually able to scan virtual machines HDs from the host OS.
The specifications disclosed, which are going to be discussed at Microsoft ITforum 05 conference, include:
- Hard Disk Foot Format
- Dynamic Disk Header Format
- Block Allocation Table and Data Blocks
- Implementing a Dynamic Disk
- Mapping a Disk Sector to a Sector in the Block
- Splitting Hard Disk Images
- Implementing a Differencing Hard Disk
- CHS Calculation
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Comments
Anyone want to take any bets that the license is written to ensure that no open source products would be able to make use of it? (I've already requested a copy of the License Agreement)
By
Robert Aitchison, at Monday, October 17, 2005 5:33:00 PM
Robert,
please update me about this. I will update the blog post as well.
Thank You
Alessandro
By
Anonymous, at Monday, October 17, 2005 7:50:00 PM
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