Other virtual drive formats for linking to physical disk device or to archive content

Question

It is known that you can link to physical disk device through VMDK virtual drive format. It works on Mac*, Lin*, Win* with VirtualBox or VMware ( here solution with VBoxManage internalcommands createrawvmdk is described ).

I repeat: it is about symbolic linking to physical device, archive content, block device or FS partition in OS, but not about creating image copy of physical device data.

So, what are other virtual drive formats (except vmdk), which supports symbolic (logical) linking to physical disk device (in Linux or Windows operating systems)?

P.S.: Read only mode is enough.

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 09 '19 at 21:31

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Several hypervisors allow direct attach of disks. KVM raw, Hyper-V pass through.

Neither uses a disk file containing raw disk metadata instead of data. That seems to be a peculiarity of VMDK.

answered Nov 09 '19 at 21:31

John Mahowald

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Please edit your question if those are requirements of yours. – John Mahowald Nov 13 '19 at 12:51
Partial answer is here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/22327728/mounting-vmdk-disk-image/49000377#49000377 – user1742529 Dec 26 '19 at 11:09

Other virtual drive formats for linking to physical disk device or to archive content

1 Answers1