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on July 31 2008, 11:58 AM
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When creating virtual machines with Hyper-V, there are additional considerations that you must take when storing virtual machine configuration. A common misconception is that the virtual machine configuration is only the xml file that contains the hardware configuration for the VM. The remainder of the configuration also includes two files, which will add to the necessary disk space requirements.
· <vmguid>.bin
· <vmguid>.vsv
So what are these files used for?
The .bin file is used to allocate enough space to store the contents of memory for the virtual machine , should the VM need to be saved, and will be the size of memory defined for the child partition.
The .vsv file is our saved state for devices. When booting a virtual machine 20 MB is reserved for the .vsv. When placing the virtual machine into a saved state, this file may shrink or may grow upwards to 50 MB depending on the number of devices configured for the virtual machine.
The default location for storing virtual machine configuration is C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Hyper-V\Virtual Machines, but this is configurable via Hyper-V Settings in Hyper-V Manager.
Since there are variables that will determine the amount of disk space needed per VM, we would recommend allotting for Child Partition Memory + 100 MB for virtual machines without snapshots.
If you are using snapshots, such as in development and test environments, a bin and vsv will be created for each snapshot. The size of these files will not be as large since they only contain changes from the base virtual machine or the parent snapshot.
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