We all know the advantages provided to us by a virtualization infrastructure today. Microsoft’s Virtual Hard Disk (.VHD) format provides a way to make virtual machine hard drives portable and provides administrators an easy way to test an application or an operating system quickly without spending too much time to configure the operating system or the application.  According to Microsoft, The Microsoft VHD Test Drive Program provides customers a flexible, extensible and supported evaluation experience requiring minimal hardware and IT overhead. You can access the catalog of pre-configured Microsoft solutions in VHD format for test, evaluation, demonstration, training & education and proof of concept.  For example, you can currently download a VHD for Microsoft System Center 2012 Beta and play with it. Most of the VHDs require or recommend running on Microsoft Hyper-V server, however some can also be run on older Microsoft Virtual Server or Microsoft Virtual PC

Virtual Hard Disks (VHDs) available by product type:

There is a lot of selection, especially from Microsoft products which you can download VHDs for and evaluate or use in production. Few of the examples of the VHD products available are:

Windows Server 2008 R2 (Hyper-V)

Windows Server 2008 (Hyper-V)

Windows Server 2003 R2 (Virtual Server R2)

You can visit Microsoft’s Virtual Hard Disk Test Program website and check it out yourself!