Support of Virtual and Real Media

This section lists the types of disks that can be used by Parallels virtual machines and provides the information about basic operations you can perform on these disks.

Supported Types of Hard Disks

Parallels virtual machines can use only virtual hard disks image files as their hard disks.

Virtual Hard Disks

The capacity of a virtual hard disk can be set from 100 MB to 16 TB.

Virtual hard disks can be of either plain or expanding format. When you create a virtual machine in Express Windows or Typical mode (in the New Virtual Machine wizard), the disk is created in the expanding format.

Split disks

A virtual disk of either format can be a single-piece disk or a split disk. A split disk is cut into 2 GB pieces and is stored as a single .hdd file.

CD/DVD Discs and Their Images

Parallels Cloud Server can access real CD/DVD discs and images of CD/DVD discs.

Parallels Cloud Server has no limitations on using multi-session CD/DVD discs. A virtual machine can play back audio CDs without any limitations on copy-protected discs.

If your server has a recordable optical drive, you can use it to burn CD or DVD discs in a virtual machine.

Parallels Cloud Server supports CD/DVD disc images in ISO, CUE, and CCD formats.

Floppy Disks and Floppy Disk Images

Parallels Cloud Server can use two types of floppy disks:

• Real diskettes inserted into a real floppy disk drive that is connected to the virtual machine.
• Floppy disk image files having the .fdd extension and connected to the virtual machine.

Parallels Cloud Server treats floppy disk images like real diskettes. Parallels Cloud Server supports floppy disk image files that have the .fdd extension and are 1.44 MB in size.

With Parallels Cloud Server, you can also create an image of a blank floppy using the Floppy Disk pane of the Virtual Machine Configuration dialog.

Note: Parallels Cloud Server cannot create images of real diskettes.