Minimising VHD size for WS2003 Enterprise SP1 in Virtual Server

re: Minimising VHD size for WS2003 Enterprise SP1 in Virtual Server

Wayne Taylor — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 09:11:29 GMT

Why not use an external (3.5inch) USB 2.0 drive? Or is this method to slow? You could have all your images on one drive and not have to think about drive space, the only pain is having to get the drive out every time you wanted to you VS.....

re: Minimising VHD size for WS2003 Enterprise SP1 in Virtual Server

jhoward — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 13:40:35 GMT

Wayne - yes, USB drive is an option, but you're right, it's a pain compared to having everything held straight on the laptop directly. Smaller VHDs also mean they're a lot quicker moving around to and from external disks and/or network, you can have more of them for the multitude of environments I build, so hence the reason for trying to make them as small as possible.

re: Minimising VHD size for WS2003 Enterprise SP1 in Virtual Server

Robert Aitchison — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 18:17:43 GMT

Good stuff,

I thought I was doing good deleting the temp files, contents of the media folder, extra wallpaper, etc.

One think I like to do if I'm making a master image is to attach the VHD file as another disk on a separate Windows 2003 virtual machine, then delete the page file, run defrag & the precompact utility while that system is offline and these tools can work better.

The Windows Server 2003 SP1 master image I just did last week was about 1.5Gb and zips down to about half that, using the tipe above I can probably shave a bunch off.

re: Minimising VHD size for WS2003 Enterprise SP1 in Virtual Server

jhoward — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 21:38:04 GMT

Just wanted to add....

____BEFORE___ anyone deletes the \windows\inf directory for good, keep a backup of it somewhere (or don't delete it at all). Reason is simple - although the VM runs fine as it is, "sysprep"ing it or "dcpromo"ing it will fail. Fortunately, although I didn't mention it in the original blog entry, it's probably best _not_ to remove the contents from this directory unless you keep a backup somewhere else. On the other hand though, after reinstating it, re-precompacting and compacting the hard disk, the resultant VHD was still only 10MB larger

re: Minimising VHD size for WS2003 Enterprise SP1 in Virtual Server

Andrew Dugdell — Wed, 27 Apr 2005 10:54:55 GMT

Ben Armstrong has a good section on his blog about this: http://blogs.msdn.com/virtual_pc_guy/archive/2005/02/11/370916.aspx

re: Minimising VHD size for WS2003 Enterprise SP1 in Virtual Server

dan e — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 23:46:39 GMT

i think removing DLLCACHE may also cause problems with Windows Security Protection but this is ok in test environments as your not registering any DLLs i guess.

I tried removing it to reduce my RIS build size.

Beware Virtual PC Differencing Disks!

John Watson — Mon, 09 May 2005 18:45:21 GMT

re: Minimising VHD size for WS2003 Enterprise SP1 in Virtual Server

Jon Robertson — Mon, 22 Aug 2005 17:37:37 GMT

During the early days of Virtual PC (when Connectrix still had it), I read about using Norton Ghost for compacting my VHD. This works great and is still the method I use today.

I have a MS-DOS VHD with Norton Ghost installed.
I have a BLANKHD.VHD, which is a dynamic sizing 16GB HD. (Choose your own size.) Before I start a compact, I copy BLANKHD.VHD to NEWHD.VHD. This saves the step of running the Virtual Disk Wizard. The copy is very fast since the VHD is so small. But you could run the Wizard each time instead.

The first time I compacted, I setup a Norton VPC. The VPC uses the MS-DOS/Norton VHD as Disk 1, my LARGE VHD that I want to compact as Disk 2, and NEWHD.VHD as Disk 3.

I boot into the VPC, start Norton, let it sign the disks, then ghost from disk two to disk three.

Once done, I rename the original large VHD, rename NEWVHD.VHD, and restart the VPC that uses the compacted VHD. Once I see everything starts, I delete the original large VHD.

Now, once the Norton VPC is configured, all I have to do is copy BLANKHD.VHD to NEWHD.VHD and change the configuration of Disk 2 to the VHD that I want to compact.

This results in extremely well compacted and defragmented VHDs. I can't remember the last time I ghosted a physical HD. But I ghost VHDs almost weekly.