VMWare question

DenSter

I am putting a new VMWare virtual machine together and am just amazed at how just putting the OS, Office and Visual Studio, and running all windows updates made the VM explode to 35GB. Does anyone have some good tips on how to compress that a little?

While we're on the subject... I'm interested in your experiences with VirtualBox, that seems to be the next go-to virtual machine solution.

kriki

35 GB is quite normal for W2008R2.

I created some W2008R2 in the Azure VM-role and Microsoft provisioned the system drive with 30GB.

A few days ago I was at a customer talking about it and they provisioned 40 GB for the system to have some spare if they need to Update the machine.

On my VM's I have taken the (bad?) habit to compress some subdirs.

Compress only subdirs that are read a lot but written very little. Avoid the temp-dirs of the system and the user-data or move them to another place. I generally create a d:-drive with a subdir temp in which I put both the system and user-temp-dirs in (I use only the admin-account to do something in those VM's).

ara3n

I use Virtual Box and currently only use for different clients for their VPN connection.

The actual windows 7 64 bit .vdi file is 12 gig.
In the OS itself. It show 28 gig Free used out of 40 gig.


I have only installed two VPN clients.

Luc_VanDyck

I have a VMware VM with Windows 2008 Server R2, some Office 2010 applications (Word, Excel, Outlook, OneNote) and NAV 2013. The vmdk-file is 18,8 GB. Didn't do anything special to compress. Does this Windows version still stores all updates/patches in some temp-dir? If it does, then you can delete all these files after succesfully updating, and then defrag & compress the vmdk-file (it's called "Clean Up Disks" in VMware 9).

kriki

Luc Van Dyck wrote:

If it does, then you can delete all these files after successfully updating, and then defrag & compress the vmdk-file (it's called "Clean Up Disks" in VMware 9).

It is possible to delete those files, but it can bite you back in the future when you try to upgrade some things. Sometimes the upgrade will ask you to show you the original files to de-install something. And you don't have them any-more because you deleted them. I've been bitten by this problem. Luckily I still had some backup of my complete system to restore the files.

Instead of deleting the files, you might move them to some external disk archive. If some upgrade (or de-install program) needs them, at least you still have them.