VHD (Virtual Hard Disk)
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A VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) is a file format that represents a virtual hard disk drive. It acts like a physical hard drive but is stored as a file on a real disk, allowing users to create a disk image that can be used with virtual machines. Introduced by Connectix for their Virtual PC product, it was later acquired by Microsoft and has since become a standard part of many virtualization products. A VHD can be used to install an operating system, applications, and to store data, mimicking the functionality of a physical hard drive. It supports several types of disk images, including fixed size (where the virtual disk consumes as much physical disk space as the size of the virtual disk) and dynamically expanding (where the disk image file grows as data is added to the VHD). VHDs are utilized in various cloud computing services and virtualization software, offering flexibility, portability, and the ability to backup, replicate, and distribute entire software configurations.