Disk Drive Requirements for Host Systems

Host systems must meet certain disk drive requirements. Guest operating systems can reside on physical disk partitions or in virtual disk files.

Table 1. Disk Drive Requirements for Host Systems

Drive Type	Requirements
Hard disk	IDE, SATA, SCSI and NVMe hard drives are supported. At least 1 GB free disk space is recommended for each guest operating system and the application software used with it. If you use a default setup, the actual disk space needs are approximately the same as those for installing and running the guest operating system and applications on a physical computer. Refer to the vendor's recommended disk space for a specific guest operating system. For basic installation, ~2.5 GB of free disk space is required on Windows and Linux. You can delete the installer after the installation is complete to reclaim disk space.
Optical CD-ROM and DVD	IDE, SATA, and SCSI optical drives are supported. CD-ROM and DVD drives are supported. ISO disk image files are supported.
Floppy	Virtual machines can connect to disk drives on the host computer. Floppy disk image files are also supported.