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 J. 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:
Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010
6:21 AM
To: Chris Henley
Cc: '
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-virtual-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
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:
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:
Sent: Thursday, December 10, 2009
7:27 AM
To:
Subject: RE: exporting a VM that
has a large, compacted dynamic VHD
Hi Chris. Any thoughts on this?
Laurence Bates
From: Laurence Bates
[mailto:
Sent: Tuesday, December 01, 2009
10:49 AM
To: 'Chris Henley'
Cc:
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
217E Erickson Hall
MI 48824
517-355-2178
An exuberant rationalist...