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virtual drive (virtual disk or RAM drive)

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virtual drive (virtual disk or RAM drive)

What is a virtual disk?

A virtual disk (also known as a virtual drive or a RAM drive) is a file that represents as a physical disk drive to a guest operating system. The file may be configured on the host and also on a remote file system. The user can install a new operating system onto the virtual disk without repartitioning the physical disk or rebooting the host machine.

See also: virtual hard disk, virtual floppy drive, disk image

Related glossary terms: GSX Server, root partition, SPARC (Scalable Processor Architecture) , systems management, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), virtual private server (VPS) or virtual dedicated server (VDS), live migration, physical to virtual (P2V) , Our Favorite Technology Blogs, Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM)

This was last updated in August 2008

Posted by: Margaret Rouse

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