VDK all the way

After lots of research, I’m in favour of the Virtual Disk Driver program called VDK available from http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vdk.html and distributed under the GPL licence. Here’s some of the features that attracted me to it:

• VDK doesn’t require running an MSI for installation – In keeping with the principles of starting a new project (checkout and go), I can simply include this file as part of a code repostiory, and know that I’m not forcing every other developer yet another manual step. Although you do need to install VDK, it’s a command line registration that is as simple as: vdk.exe install.
• VDK is fully executable via the command line – This allows me to wrap this in the language of my choice to help automate environment setup as needed for a particular test to run.
• VDK supports VMDK (VMWare Disk) images – Using other tools to generate the files that I want, I can easily use VDK to mount them to a particular drive letter.
• VDK supports mounting with different options – Including read-only, read-write, and write-block mode.
• VDK has good documentation – I found it really easy to understand what commands to execute to install, remove, mount, unmount, all with different options because both the command line (vdk.exe help) and the readme.txt had plenty of information and examples. It also helps that it follows conventions with other command line programs (following the DOS conventions of parameters with slashes)
• VDK is realiable – I did plenty of different tests mounting and unmounting and it just keeps going (though your Windows Explorer may need a refresh (F5) to keep up).

Using a VMWare Disk Image created by QEMU as discussed previously, I can now create a new virtual disk mounted in windows simply by using the following commands:

vdk install
vdk open 0 floppy_disk.vmdk /P:0 /RW /L:Y
format /fs:fat y:

See the image below: