Do you put Acronis on the virtual server guest? Or on the host? I had this same thought but I didn't know how Hyper-V would react to this.
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Shrink a VHD
Does anybody have a safe method to reduce the size of a Hyper-V VHD? I have a dynamic 400gb VHD with about 220gb of data in it. The file dynamically grew to over 350gb. My physical storage is now 100% full. The Hyper-V disk compact tool is all but useless, it freed up around 100gb which was quickly consumed. I have read posts saying to defrag and then run compact again. Defrag was what caused the disk to increase from 320gb to 350gb. So my questions.
1. How do you compact a file and get real size reduction?
2. How do you change the VHD to actually shrink it? I want to convert to a fixed disk and make it only 300gb. This should be fine because I only have 220gb of data in it. I found the VMToolkit tool and it doesn't seem to have any ability to shrink a file below it's initially created size.
Am I stuck with conventional methods of creating a new VHD, adding it to my virtual server and moving the data over?
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by: neilbob1Posted on 2009-03-08 at 07:22:23ID: 23829475
SCVMM 2008 (System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008) does a great job of this. I have not tried in the Hyper-V manager but with the SCVMM it works well. You have to stop the VM and then go to the properties and then to the hard disk. There you select to compact. Click OK and it runs as a process. Took about 1-2 minutes for a 13GB disk. It reduced that to 11GB. On another one that was 43GB it reduced it to 36GB and took about 10 minutes. SCVMM is a must if you are using multiple VM's in Hyper-V.
Other than shrinking, if you want to reduce the stated size of the disk, Acronis Disk Director does a nice job of this. I have not tried it in Hyper V but it did work to reduce a fixed size disk I had in VMWare Server 1.0.