Reducing the size of a Virtual Machine

[Ernest]

Hi Everyone,

I am currently preparing a VMware virtual machine that I will have to send to a partner. My manager has agreed to send the DVD, only I'm afraid it is too big when I would finish.

Are there any tools or other vmWare to reduce the size of the virtual image to the maximum (defragmentation, compression, ....) and do keep virtual disks that eventually bytes actually used (without changing the size of these theoretical discs)?

Thanks for any help

[worm4u]

The only option I've seen about this trainer is for the creation of the virtual machine. When you do again (assuming that this is the same for you) you have option "Allocate all disk space now" in the last page of the wizard (or something) that allows to say that vm file is exactly the size used on the disc this file to grow as the use of virtual hard disk increases.

[Fleming]

Hi,

=> Zip compression, or better 7z is enough?

=> To reduce the size of the hard drive to the smallest size possible, you should be able to recover without a big problem. Ie:

• Said yourself that your hard disk is comparable to a large physical partition, and you can not resize it, just create a new one, and delete.
  
• In this case the procedure would be (all in the virtual machine, with his / her hard drives also virtual): you have a virtual hard disk with a partition dX pX:
  
• Reduce X p ~ to its minimum (or equivalent via GParted, here we will use GParted in the virtual machine)
  
• Clone the system partition pX dX disk to a new partition of pY dY a new disc (an additional virtual disk you have created to the size that goes well, cloning can also be done via GParted in the virtual machine) .
  
• Remove the disc dX
  
• DY hard link to your virtual machine to the former place of dX
  
• Repair / redo the boot if necessary
  
• It is ready

[Big Fish]

You can't reduce the disk size, only increase. You'll need to add a second smaller HD and then from within the guest use either an imaging tool like ghost or MS robocopy with the /MIR /SEC options to copy the data from your large drive to your new smaller drive. When that's done, remove the old large drive, and away you go.