Dinesh Dharmalingam

Virtual Machine Storage type Fixed size or Dynamic size? Which one Should I use? Whoever used a virtual machine in your lifetime you might have came across this prompt while creating a virtual machine.  You should have seen the option to choose from either Dynamically Allocated  Fixed Size And its obvious that many go for the default one Dynamically allocated.  Did you ever thought what is the advantage of Fixed size over Dynamic size? Here is where the difference I noticed Dynamically allocated This type of virtual disk file will not consume the actual physical storage in your hard disk but it shows as it has that many allocated size (free memory) available to your virtual OS. The advantages are: Actual Physical memory will not be occupied You can actually create a virtual disk even more than the physical drive size eg: you can create 1 TB virtual disk on a 128 GB physical storage. But here is a big drawback which many failed to consider. Since y