I need help understanding the differences in VM HDD images...
I use VHDs as I can mount them in Windows as the difference in speed doing large copy operations, bidirectional transfer, partition shenanigans, etc. inside and outside the VM is *HUGE*, but what's the difference between VHD, VDI, QCOW2 and VMDK?

@C0D4 This seems somewhat incorrect as VHDs are supported by VMWare as well, possibly QEMU too, and there's not much more difference than support...

but thanks!

@Parzi this is from 2011, I couldn't find a more accurate and timely comparison.
But for the most part it's pretty much right beyond support.

Personally I use vmdk so I can "generally" export from virtualbox and import into VMware, there's been a handful of times that failed miserably forcing me to rebuild inside VMware.

@C0D4 i can't use VMWare as it makes old OSes die all the time (NT4 can't even finish installing, PKUNZIP can't extract 1/8 of the time, DOS 6.22 has screen mode issues, etc.) and that's 98% of what I mess with, so...

add to that needing to mount as a drive in host to do large operations and it's VHD all the way for me but I didn't know if there was like a massive difference or not. I heard VMDK has builtin encryption support but I can't find a source for that

@Parzi I use virtualbox for almost everything, work uses VMware / sphere coz... they can.

Only time I've been forced to use VMware personally is for hackintosh, seems to work better in VMware for some reason.

I don't know how Virtualbox goes goes for older OSes, I don't mess with them anymore or use dosbox if I want some nostalgic gaming.

VirtualBox is quite nice for old OSes.
Although often DOSBox is sufficient if you want to run DOS software.

@kescherRant I require full virt (as full as I can get anyway) for DOS as usually i'm doing malware things or programming stuff that requires actually good graphics handling.

@Parzi well, there's some demos that won't even run properly in VirtualBox, so you might want to get yourself an old school Intel 8086 machine. lol

If you're looking to run something really old, what about PCem? The emulated hardware is more suited.

@kescherRant @d4ng3r0u5 I don't need like an 8086, i'm targeting like a 486/586 or Pentium 1 for demos and malware, which VBOX does well, as well as not leaking anything except through user error. PCem and DOSBox and 86box are all not as secure as they need to be for 80% of what I do.

@Parzi There's a demo that will literally only function properly on an original IBM PC. :)

@kescherRant yes, lots of them, but I'M not making them!