Mounting a .vhd disk image using blktap/tapdisk

This page describes how to mount a .vhd disk image on a Linux system, using blktap/tapdisk. This page shows you how to modify and manipulate a .vhd disk image before booting a VM from it.

Overview

A .vhd disk image is a format originally created by Connectix for their Virtual PC and Virtual Server products, sold to Microsoft in 2003. The .vhd format is well-documented and supported by blktap/tapdisk. When using .vhd, blktap/tapdisk enable:

• thin-provisioning of disks: blocks are only allocated on first write
• snapshots, clones: gold master images can be used as read-only "parent" disks

Other similar formats exist, most notably [qcow2] used natively by qemu.