Disk image files reside on the host system and are seen by the guest systems as hard disks of a certain geometry. When a guest OS reads from or writes to a hard disk, Oracle VM VirtualBox redirects the request to the image file. Like a physical disk, a virtual disk has a size, or capacity, which must be specified when the image file is created. As opposed to a physical disk however, Oracle VM VirtualBox enables you to expand an image file after creation, even if it has data already. See Section 7.22, “VBoxManage modifymedium”. Oracle VM VirtualBox supports the following types of disk image files:
Irrespective of the disk capacity and format, as mentioned in Section 1.7, “Creating Your First Virtual Machine”, there are two options for creating a disk image: fixed-size or dynamically allocated.
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