How to Add a Virtual Hard Disk to a Virtual Machine

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Applies To: Virtual Machine Manager 2008, Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2, Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 SP1

You can add a virtual hard disk to an IDE device or a SCSI adapter with the following procedure. By default, any hardware profile includes a built-in IDE drive. You can add and configure up to four virtual SCSI adapters to a virtual machine.

Use this procedure when modifying a hardware profile or configuring hardware profile settings from the New Template Wizard or the New Virtual Machine Wizard.

Note

In VMM 2008 R2, if a virtual machine is deployed on a host that is using the Hyper-V implementation of the SCSI controller, you can add or remove a virtual hard disk or pass-through disk from the SCSI controller while the virtual machine is running. On all other storage configurations, you must stop the virtual machine before adding or removing a disk.

To add a virtual hard disk

  1. To add a virtual hard disk, take one of the following actions:

    • To add a virtual hard disk to an IDE bus, in the left pane, under Bus Configuration, click IDE Devices, and then click VHD on the top toolbar.

    • To add a virtual hard disk to a SCSI bus, click SCSI Adapter on the top toolbar and then click VHD on the toolbar.

  2. Under Channel, select a channel to attach to this virtual hard disk.

  3. Under Virtual Hard Disk, select one of the following options:

    • Use an existing virtual hard disk. Select this option if you want to add an existing virtual hard disk to the virtual machine. Click Browse to display the Select a virtual hard disk dialog box, and then select the virtual hard disk that you want to use from the list that displays on this screen.

    • Create a new virtual hard disk (available on the hardware profile for a virtual machine). Select this option if you want to create a new virtual hard disk. Modify the values for the following options:

      • Type. Select Dynamic (default) or Fixed.

      • Size. Specify, in gigabytes (GB), the size of a fixed virtual hard disk or the maximum size of a dynamically expanding virtual hard disk.

      • Destination file name. Specify the name of a new virtual hard disk.

See Also

Concepts

Creating Virtual Machines
How to Modify the Properties of a Hardware Profile