These terms describe the on-disk structures and operations that determine whether a failed Hyper-V environment is recoverable and how the work is scoped.
- VHDX (Virtual Hard Disk v2)
- The default Hyper-V virtual disk format since Windows Server 2012. The BAT (Block Allocation Table) maps virtual blocks to physical offsets, the payload block size is configurable from 1MB to 256MB (32MB default), the log region is 1MB by default, and the region table at 192KB locates the BAT and metadata.
- AVHDX (differencing / checkpoint disk)
- A differencing disk created when a checkpoint is taken. The .avhdx becomes the active write target and uses a parent locator in its metadata region to point at the parent .vhdx by path and unique ID. Only changed blocks carry payload BAT entries; everything else reads through to the parent.
- Broken checkpoint merge chain
- A merge consolidates an .avhdx into its parent. Merge-VHD is strictly an offline operation that requires the disk chain to be unattached, run against verified copies. A power loss mid-merge, or running Merge-VHD against a live degraded array, leaves both files inconsistent and can cause large-scale logical damage.
- Cluster Shared Volume (CSV)
- A volume that multiple failover-cluster nodes access at once. CSV on NTFS uses direct I/O to the SAN for data, with the coordinator node owning metadata changes. CSV on ReFS runs in redirected I/O mode, routing data through the coordinator node.
- Hyper-V Replica
- Asynchronous VM replication to a secondary host on a default 5-minute cycle. It is an availability feature, not a backup: it replays the same corruption or deletion to the replica and can diverge from the primary when replication falls behind.
- Fixed vs dynamic vs differencing disks
- A fixed VHDX preallocates its full size on creation. A dynamic VHDX grows on demand and marks unwritten blocks PAYLOAD_BLOCK_NOT_PRESENT. A differencing VHDX (.avhdx) stores only deltas relative to a parent and depends on the parent locator chain to read unchanged data.
- ReFS object table
- The root B+ tree of a ReFS volume, the ReFS equivalent of the NTFS Master File Table. Every file reference, including each VHDX, resolves through it. A damaged object table drops those references out of the namespace while the data extents survive on disk; allocate-on-write leaves historical object-table checkpoints in unallocated space that recovery can roll back to.
- ReFS integrity stream
- The optional per-block CRC-64 checksum mode on ReFS data. Metadata is always checksummed; data blocks are checksummed only when integrity streams are enabled. On a mirrored Storage Spaces volume ReFS auto-repairs a bad block from the redundant copy, but once the volume is unmountable the checksum only marks which blocks are valid and repairs nothing on its own.
- Storage Spaces Direct (S2D) pool
- A pool that aggregates local drives across cluster nodes, layers mirror or parity virtual disks on top, and formats them with ReFS for Cluster Shared Volumes. Pool metadata lives in a hidden partition on each pool drive. Quorum loss, majority-node failure, or a resiliency-floor breach takes the pool offline and removes the ReFS CSVs hosting the VHDX files from the namespace.