How do you all do Hard Drive (VHD) Clean-ups on Hyper-V VM's?

Just wondering what you guys do to clean up the hard drives, virtual hard drives to be exact, on virtual machines being ran by a hyper-V host. We have some VM's that need some space cleared up and there's not much space left on the host.

On some servers we've used things like ccleaner and other similar apps, but I just wanted to see what you all use on VM's to make sure I don't corrupt any of them.

Jason KidmanIT Consultant & CEOAsked: 2015-09-30

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David Johnson, CD, MVPOwnerCommented: 2015-10-01

Your problem is most likely you've over provisioned the storage volume using thinly provisioned virtual disks. When one creates a virtual disk there is a warning about this given but people tend to ignore warnings and just react on errors. For reclaiming space on the virtual machine you do it exactly as you would on a physical machine. disk cleanup/ccleaner etc.
You can always move the virtual disks to another drive when the machine is powered down and change the disk setting to use another location (it is only a file) This will not make the .vhd(x). any smaller you can only do this by compacting the disk

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Jason KidmanIT Consultant & CEOAuthor Commented: 2015-10-01

So is the compact option kind of like a defrag for a VHDX? From the sound of it, it will compact the files, opening up more space on the VHDX, all without deleting any files or making the VHDX smaller. Correct?