I’m a pretty big fan of virtualization, so I was interested in Invirtus’ VM Optimizer product when I first heard about it. Its an application that runs inside your virtual OS and deletes un-necessary files, defragments your virtual hard-drive and makes other improvements to help reduce the size and increase the speed of your virtual OS. Recently I downloaded the 14-day trial to see if this technology really worked. After some less-than-wildly successful first attempts I was able to cut down my 6GB XP+Weblogic VPC image to around 1.8 GB. I’m optimizing a few other VPC images now to see if I can get the same gains again. Overall a very nice and easy-to-use product, that makes backing up, moving around and sharing virtual machines very easy.
there is nothing hard about running this product, I should have just RTFM. First time I ran it it was on a machine with differencing disks set up (completely slipped my mind), which resulted in only a small improvement in size. The second time I set the amount of RAM too low resulting in a larger-than-necessary page file, and not as much of a win as I had hoped.