Lorenzo Barbieri @ Weblogs.Asp.Net

For a product which seemed to hold much promise I was shall we say...disappointed. Right from the start the thing has a feel like it was developed by one guy somewhere. The release was pushed back and back and finally let out the door. After spending 3.5 hours letting it run across my 9gig VPC it told me bounce out and run the virtual disk wizard to compact it....bzzzz; wrong again.

My experience, my 9.4 gig VPC is now 11.6 gig

it's normal that at the end of the process it asks to run the Virtual Disk Wizard... because inside the VM it's impossible to resize the vhd... it can be prepared, but the real compaction is done by the VDW

have you compacted the 11.6gb with the vdw? it's normal that with the defragmentation and erasing the vhd tends to be bigger, but with the vdw it will be reduced to the minimum...

VM Optimizer does not re-invent the wheel with regard to the final compaction. The VHD compaction processes which are built into Virtual PC and into VMware are very efficient and very well known. As such VM Optimizer does not provide this redundant functionality. Take defrag as an example: Microsoft could have developed a full blown defrag utility to ship with Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, etc. but instead chose to leverage Executive Software's defrag utililty.

Shrinking/Compaction, in essence, is a stripped down imaging process analogous to Ghost or Powerquest. While it could've been fairly straight forward to ship another imaging utility to perform the "imaging" or compaction Invirtus decided to focus on non-redundant technology.

Your comments are very interesting.