Using differencing discs in a lab environment

AvgITGeek

If you are short of hard drive space in your lab, look up using differencing discs. It is a testable objective and you save hard drive space. My lab went from 140 GB to around 90 GB.

poolmanjim

To kind of build on your points: if you have a decent sized SSD and a HDD you can do a really interesting differencing build with Storage Tiering.

1. You create a Storage Space containing the SSD and HDD.
2. Create a VHD on your server and tell it to use the tiering and have it use the full amount of both disks. Mount this vhd as whatever drive letter you want.
3. Create your "source" disk for the differencing build and sysprep the OS.
4. "Pin" the differencing disk to your fast tier (it will eventually do this automatically in a way).

Now you have a differencing setup that maximizes both performance and storage.