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I can't find confirmation on this but do VHDs work on disparate hardware (all hardware supporting Virtualization Technologies where possible).

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The short answer, it depends.

Generally you can run a virtual drive between physical machines as long as the virtualization engine is the same. Since we are talking about VHDs, I'll use Virtual PC as an example. You can copy a VHD from a desktop running Virtual PC 2007 to a notebook running Virtual PC 2007. In this case you may have minor differences in the hardware that is detected when the virtual machine is running on a different host.

The process is not as seamless if you want to copy a VMWare workstation machine to another host computer running Virtual PC.

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I should have added in my case any future desktop settings will use Hyper-V (which I am setting up on my current machine). BUT the memory, cpu, vid card, sound card and mobo will all be different in future machines. – blade4 Mar 1 '10 at 16:17
In that case you should not have any issues moving a virtual machine between different Hyper-v hosts. Just a quick note: You will be unable to use 3D video drivers. Just bringing this up because you mentioned video cards. social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverhyperv/… – PaulWaldman Mar 1 '10 at 19:29
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It won't matter that the different machines have different hardware. The virtual machine uses virtual instances of the hardware. If the hardware is very different then it might have to use different virtual drivers. As long as the Virtualisation engine is the same you'll be fine. I've had the same VHD running on all sorts of different Hardware, from Servers to Desktops to Laptops. I've never tried it on a netbook yet though (and have no intention of doing).

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