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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, 2010 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/… Mar 1, 2010 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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  • Were you Native booting or only in VMs? What version of Windows did you have on that VHD? 7/8 .. Pro/ Enterprise? Did it install new drivers everytime you moved from machine to machine?
    – Alex S
    Sep 1, 2015 at 21:21
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  • VHD is a Disk Image format

VHD (Virtual Hard Disk) is a file format which represents a virtual hard disk drive (HDD). It may contain what is found on a physical HDD, such as disk partitions and a file system, which in turn can contain files and folders. It is typically used as the hard disk of a virtual machine.

VHDs do not care so much about Hardware, its more up to Virtualization Platforms/ Operating Systems to support it. Most of them do. Some operating systems also support direct hardware Native Booting from VHD without need for a Virtualization system.

It is largely similar to RAW Disk Image format as well except for little extra on VHDs.

Fixed VHDs consist of a raw disk image followed by a VHD footer (512 or formerly 511 bytes).

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