A virtual machine that simulates the same computing architecture as the physical machine holds the virtual storage for its operating system. This storage can be set up in many different ways, where a virtual machine can have the same or different sizes of storage at the same time. This virtual storage can be accessed by the guest operating system, and in the case of a file server or other content and application server based virtual workloads, it can also be made available to the users accessing the virtual machine, and the hosted and shared connections can be accessed from there.

A virtual machine can have different types of virtual storage, but from the early days of x86-based virtualization, file-based virtual storage or specifically the virtual hard disk (VHD) type of virtual machine storage is famous and the most widely used. There are other types of virtual storage such as pass-through disks, where the administrator attaches the physical or local disk...