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Now you might be wondering, what the heck are sym links\/junctions\/reparse points and why should I care? Let’s take my current setup as an example. I’ve got a pile of virtual machines for running the latest Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 bits, along with installs for Indigo, Avalon, and WinFX. My laptop hard drive, while a spacious 60 GB, fills up rather quickly with all those VHD files. Now I could put all the VHDs on my 300 GB Maxtor external drive, but what happens when I need to use one on the road. (The Maxtor external drive requires an external power supply. So you can’t fire it up when you’re commuting on the bus.) I could copy it over to the internal drive, but then I have to tidy up my delete\/re-create the virtual machine in the VPC 2004 console. Instead I junction the virtual machine directory on my external drive to “My Documents\\My Virtual Machines”. Here is my external drive:<\/P>
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![](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/MaxtorExternal.png\")
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Here is My Documents\\My Virtual Machines:<\/P>
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![](\"\/wp-content\/uploads\/MyVirtualMachines.png\")
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The little links on the folders come from the Junction Icon Overlay.<\/P>
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When I want to create a new virtual machine on the external drive, for example Windows XP Pro – Whidbey RC1:<\/P>
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- Create an empty directory called R:\\My Virtual Hard Disks\\Windows XP Pro – Whidbey RC1.
\n - Open a command prompt in C:\\Documents and Settings\\JamesK\\My Documents\\My Virtual Machines\\.
\n - Run the command: junction “Windows XP Pro – Whidbey RC1” “R:\\My Virtual Hard Disks\\Windows XP Pro – Whidbey RC1”.
\n - Create the new virtual machine using the Virtual Disk Wizard and Virtual Machine Wizard as per normal using the path “C:\\Documents and Settings\\JamesK\\My Documents\\My Virtual Machines\\Windows XP Pro – Whidbey RC1”.<\/LI><\/OL>
\nThis has a number of advantages over just creating the virtual machine on the external drive:<\/P>
\n- If I ever want to make that virtual machine portable, I simply delete the junction (junction -d “Windows XP Pro – Whidbey RC1”) and copy the directory over to the same place. VPC 2004 will never be the wiser.
\n - If I decide to archive an old virtual machine on the internal drive because a new beta drop just hit the streets, I copy it to the external drive and create a junction.
\n - If I fire up VPC 2004 without the external drive, only virtual machines on the internal hard drive appear. If I add the external hard drive and restart the VPC 2004 console, the virtual machine images on the external drive appear once again. (Very cool feature. I wonder if the VPC 2004 dev team knows about it.) \ud83d\ude42
\n - You don’t have to re-target your differencing VHDs when you move your base VHDs. Just create a junction from the original location to the new location of the base VHDs.<\/LI><\/UL>
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\n - If I ever want to make that virtual machine portable, I simply delete the junction (junction -d “Windows XP Pro – Whidbey RC1”) and copy the directory over to the same place. VPC 2004 will never be the wiser.
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