Virtual Drive

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What Does Virtual Drive Mean?

A virtual drive is a type of logical drive that is used in virtualization solutions. A virtual drive is like a typical drive that is natively installed in a virtual machine or virtual server by the hypervisor.

A virtual drive is also known as a virtual disk drive.

Techopedia Explains Virtual Drive

A virtual drive serves the same purpose as a hard drive does for a computer, except it does so for a virtual machine. The virtual drive is created by the virtualization manager by logically dividing and distributing space among one or more virtual machines. The virtual drive can be used to install virtual machine guest operating systems, applications and data. Virtual drive capacity depends on the base requirement and the underlying physical drive capacity. In storage virtualization, a virtual drive is a logically isolated storage drive on top of a storage area network.

A cloud-based storage solution that is installed in a drive on a local computer is also known as virtual drive.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert
Margaret Rouse
Technology Expert

Margaret is an award-winning technical writer and teacher known for her ability to explain complex technical subjects to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles by the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret's idea of a fun day is helping IT and business professionals learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.

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