How to Shrink large Hyper-V VM
- by autrevo
Using Disk2VHD utility I converted my bare-metal OS into Hyper-V VHD -
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/ee656415.aspx
And I could obtain a huge 190GB VHD file. Apart from performance issues, this VHD worked fine as guest when hosted on Windows Server 200 R2, Hyper-V.
Having realized need to keeping only system files and application installations on VHD.
I have deleted most of the junk data from this VHD and now it contains only 20-25 GB. But I am not able to shrink the VHD VM. Having done some research, I came to know, this as a limitation of .VHD files.
Subsequently I followed these two step using Edit Virtual Hard Wizard on Windows 2012 Box.
Convert from VHD to VHDX (took close to 3 hrs.)
Compact (Another 4 hrs.)
This did not ever shrink the VHDX either. Does Hyper-V does not provide proper support to handle large VHDs or VHDXs whose size are the range of 200GB.
