Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

Compacting Virtual Hard Disks with Hyper-V

When you choose to compact a virtual hard disk with Hyper-V a very interesting process is used.  The virtual hard disk is actually connected to the parent partition (but it is not mounted).  Windows then inspects the virtual hard disk.  If the virtual hard disk is NTFS formatted, the NTFS data structures are analyzed to determine how to compact the virtual hard disk.  If the virtual hard disk is not NTFS formatted it is analyzed as a raw device and zeroed out blocks are compacted.

This means that if you have a NTFS formatted virtual hard disk you do not need to prepare the virtual hard disk for compaction.  If you have a virtual hard disk that is formatted with a different file system you will still need to use an application to zero out free space on the virtual hard disk before attempting to compact it.

Cheers,
Ben

Published Thursday, March 13, 2008 5:29 PM by Virtual PC Guy
Filed under:

Comments

Thursday, March 13, 2008 11:09 PM by MSDN Blog Postings » Compacting Virtual Hard Disks with Hyper-V

# MSDN Blog Postings » Compacting Virtual Hard Disks with Hyper-V

PingBack from http://msdnrss.thecoderblogs.com/2008/03/13/compacting-virtual-hard-disks-with-hyper-v/

Friday, March 14, 2008 7:35 AM by arun.philip

# re: Compacting Virtual Hard Disks with Hyper-V

Oh wow, this is so cool.

Any chances of this feature making its way into a service pack for VPC 2007, or a future version.

Any chances of other OS vendors being able to extend this so that they can implement a plug in to similarly benefit other OSes? I think the Linux community would be very interested in doing so.

I know you don't talk about future functionality, but how about passing this on as a suggestion?

Tuesday, March 25, 2008 8:12 AM by Bob's Nieuws

# Nieuws t/m week 11

Bron: Microsoft.com In de laatste patch ronde was er een update bij die bij veel systemen voor problemen

New Comments to this post are disabled
 
Page view tracker