As an avid user of Virtual PC (something that is only going to increase now that it’s free!) I’ve alwayys had issues with the bloated nature of the Virtual Hard Disk files. 1.5 - 2 GB is nothing unusual and once you’ve got a couple of instances of that stored your hard drive is starting to creak under the strain.
Fortunately, Coding Horror has put together a tutorial for crunching Windows XP VMs down to a more manageable size - 641MB to be precise! Want to know how to get a clean XP build that will fit on a CD? Then go and read the tutorial - Coding Horror: Creating Smaller Virtual Machines.
The only heads up would be that a couple of the tools named are Shareware and require payment for full use of the feature set. That said I think a few $$$ spent is repaid in a few 100MB saved per machine.
Anybody know if there is a similar tool for Server 2003?
24/07/2006 at 5:30 am Permalink
Checkout
http://www.sharepointblogs.com/alpesh/archive/2006/07/19/9326.aspx
I have used contig and its really great!
Cheers!