Building my Orion Lab (Differencing Disks)

So, I made a quick edit on the script that I used in this post to use Differencing Disks.

Just replace…

Write-Progress -Activity "Creating Virtual Machines" -CurrentOperation "Creating $NewVM" -Status "Copy O/S Disk" -PercentComplete ( ( $i / $iCount ) * 100 )
$VhdPath = Join-Path -Path $( ( Get-VMHost ).VirtualHardDiskPath ) -ChildPath "$( $NewVM )_C.vhdx"
Start-BitsTransfer -Source $TemplateVHD -Destination $VhdPath -Description "Copying Template Hard Drive"

Write-Progress -Activity "Creating Virtual Machines" -CurrentOperation "Creating $NewVM" -Status "Add O/S Disk" -PercentComplete ( ( $i / $iCount ) * 100 )
$VM | Add-VMHardDiskDrive -Path $VhdPath

with…

Write-Progress -Activity "Creating Virtual Machines" -CurrentOperation "Creating $NewVM" -Status "Create O/S Disk (Differencing)" -PercentComplete ( ( $i / $iCount ) * 100 )
$VhdPath = Join-Path -Path $( ( Get-VMHost ).VirtualHardDiskPath ) -ChildPath "$( $NewVM )_C.vhdx"
New-VHD -ParentPath $TemplateVhd -Path $VhdPath -Differencing | Out-Null

Write-Progress -Activity "Creating Virtual Machines" -CurrentOperation "Creating $NewVM" -Status "Add O/S Disk" -PercentComplete ( ( $i / $iCount ) * 100 )
$VM | Add-VMHardDiskDrive -Path $VhdPath

Differencing disks use less disk space, but you sacrifice disk performance.  Since I’m working with a local flash disk, I decided that this was worth the risk.