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FYI _____ From: Chris Henley [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 11:00 AM To: Laurence Bates Subject: RE: exporting a VM that has a large, compacted dynamic VHD Nice solution! I love this kind of thinking. Would you mind if I blogged about your story. I will use only your First name of course unless you would like full notoriety :-). Great work! I will forward this info to our Hyper-V team with a suggestion to include similar functionality in Hyper-V manager. Thanks, Chris Henley From: Laurence Bates [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 6:21 AM To: Chris Henley Cc: 'Bates, Laurence' Subject: RE: exporting a VM that has a large, compacted dynamic VHD Hi Chris. After a fairly exhaustive search on the Internet for a technique to shrink a Hyper-V Dynamically Expanding Boot VHD to a smaller fixed sized VHD, I concluded that the consensus from Microsoft techs is that Hyper-V tools cannot accomplish this task. There are a variety of complex and risky sounding techniques to do this but I found a tip to what I consider to be the best one at <http://weblogs.asp.net/soever/archive/2008/01/15/reduce-the-size-of-a-virtu al-hard-disk-before-delivery-for-reuse.aspx> http://weblogs.asp.net/soever/archive/2008/01/15/reduce-the-size-of-a-virtua l-hard-disk-before-delivery-for-reuse.aspx It works wonderfully and uses a highly reliable and time-tested tool that is relatively inexpensive (Ghost). I have expanded the steps necessary to accomplish the task below. Technique to shrink a Hyper-V Dynamically Expanding Boot VHD to a smaller fixed sized VHD (Win2008 SP2 or R2): 1) Start with a Hyper-V VM that has a dynamically expanding boot VHD whose maximum size is too large - i.e. the default settings ;-). 2) Stop the VM and open the VM's Settings. 3) Add a new, appropriately sized, fixed VHD as drive 1 on IDE Controller 0. 4) Add the physical CD/DVD Drive to the VM. 5) Restart the VM with a licensed Symantec Ghost 11.5 rescue Boot CD in the physical CD/DVD drive. 6) Use Symantec Ghost to copy the larger, dynamically expanding VHD to the smaller, fixed sized one. 7) Close the VM after Ghost has completed the task. 8) Enter the settings of the closed VM and release but do not erase the dynamically expanding VHD. 9) Release the VM's new fixed VHD and then re-add it to IDE Controller 0 as drive 0. 10)Restart the VM and check that it boots correctly from the new, smaller VHD. The initial idea for these steps was found at the URL below: http://weblogs.asp.net/soever/archive/2008/01/15/reduce-the-size-of-a-virtua l-hard-disk-before-delivery-for-reuse.aspx P.S. This technique could be used to add this useful capability to Hyper-V. You might want to suggest it to the Hyper-V developers. Laurence Bates _____ From: Chris Henley [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Friday, December 11, 2009 12:12 PM To: Laurence Bates Subject: RE: exporting a VM that has a large, compacted dynamic VHD Laurence, I have yet to find a solution to this issue. I will keep looking but you have me stumped. The size limitation on export is 127GB. Your 25 Gb vhd is well within those confines. How have you compacted the disk? From: Laurence Bates [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Thursday, December 10, 2009 7:27 AM To: 'Laurence Bates'; Chris Henley Subject: RE: exporting a VM that has a large, compacted dynamic VHD Hi Chris. Any thoughts on this? Laurence Bates _____ From: Laurence Bates [mailto:[log in to unmask]] Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2009 10:49 AM To: 'Chris Henley' Cc: 'Laurence Bates' Subject: exporting a VM that has a large, compacted dynamic VHD Hi Chris. We met at the recent Dev Connections and you asked me to email you and request a solution for dealing with a Windows 2008 Server (Enterprise) Hyper-V VM that was originally created with a dynamic VHD of 127GB on a 250GB boot drive and now is stuck in a mode where the export to a second large drive does not complete even after dropping all snapshots and compacting the VM. The VM is only using about 25GB of the dynamic disk. Thanks Laurence A. Bates College of Education Michigan State University 217E Erickson Hall East Lansing MI 48824 517-355-2178 [log in to unmask] An exuberant rationalist...