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Chris Marisic
Asked: 2011-01-07 13:49:40 +0800 CST

Microsoft SC VMM 2008 R2 doesn't have option to compact virtual hard disk

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I can't figure out how to shrink a VHD using Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2. Viewing the article Shrink your VHD size seems like this would be simple to do. However I don't see any of those check boxes that article shows.

The article does mention that all check points need deleted first, I have followed that information and deleted the check points.

Here's what I see alt text

virtualization hyper-v vhd scvmm shrink

2 Answers

  1. This seems to be a limitation in terms of the IDE virtualization. If a hard drive is on the IDE adapter, the virtual machine must be stopped before any changes to the hard disk can be made.

    http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd353280.aspx

    The reason you're not seeing the options is probably because the VM is running.

    Here's a screenshot of my VM properties of a running VM with IDE as the storage configuration. alt text

    Hope this helps!

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  2. Best Answer

    Between yesterday and this morning 2 things occurred inside of SC VMM without any interaction from myself:

    1. the check boxes that weren't visible appeared in the virtual machine properties.
    2. the amount of disk allocated to the machine I wanted to compact decreased by almost half.

    Combining this observation with information I read yesterday that deleting check points is a slow process, it appears that I had deleted the check points but they weren't physically deleted. That at any point a VHD has check points in any state it disables access to these disk controls.

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