>>I'd say that "exactly the same" never really existed. It's in the eye of... whoever wants to stop you from getting too deep into their setup.
>
>[shrug] In the situation I was dealing with, indeed the old server and new server were logically configured the same way -- a mapped network drive is indistinguishable from a physical drive in an abstract sense (i.e. a reference to storage device), if you choose to disregard a certain level of detail.

A trueism - but with VM performance it could already bite you in form of drastically lower performance if memory distribution between host and guest system was not done to optimize caching ability to that "certain level of detail" of how a logical device available to the VM was accessed/configured.