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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

Chris Marisic
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2 Answers2

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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!

JohnThePro
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  • The machine is absolutely stopped. – Chris Marisic Jan 07 '11 at 13:55
  • You got it right, when theres snapshots involved you loose access to those options until the snapshots are finished applying. – ErnieTheGeek Jan 07 '11 at 14:18
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    +1, Unfortunately VMM hides options that aren't currently available (instead of graying them out), so there's something preventing you from compacting (running VM, snapshots, not a dynamic VHD, etc). – Chris S Jan 07 '11 at 14:20
  • You may also want to consider migrating (carefully) to a SCSI interface inside your VM. It'll allow you the ability to hot-swap virtual drives, etc. Something on my to-do list as well. – JohnThePro Jan 07 '11 at 16:55
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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.

Chris Marisic
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    Deleted checkpoints only merge while the machine is off and it's an incredibly slow process (typically in the order of a few GB/h). – Chris S Jan 07 '11 at 14:22