VMware Cloud Community
MadOldschool
Contributor
Contributor
‎07-19-2007 11:50 AM

Compressing Virutual Machines prior to migration to new host

What is the best way to accomplish this?

I have several 4 GB VMs, and I cant compressem with WinRAR or KGB Archiver...

I get errors...

How are people compressing these large files under Windows hosts?

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3 Replies
Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal
‎07-19-2007 11:53 AM

What sort of error are you getting with WinRAR because you should be OK with a 4 GB file. As an alternative, www.7-zip.org works well.

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Texiwill
Leadership
Leadership
‎07-19-2007 01:46 PM

Hello,

You may first have to export the VM to a 2gbsparse file. Some compression tools do not understand sparse files, which is the state of the monolithic VMs.

Best regards,

Edward

--
Edward L. Haletky
vExpert XIV: 2009-2023,
VMTN Community Moderator
vSphere Upgrade Saga: https://www.astroarch.com/blogs
GitHub Repo: https://github.com/Texiwill
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VMwareSME
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎07-19-2007 01:56 PM

I create a mount on the server and then point it to a windows share.

1. create directory command

mkdir /(directory name)

2. then mount it with the command below.

mount -t smbfs //windows_server/share /mnt/vc -o username=admin user

3. Then export the file to the windows share

vmkfstools -e /mnt/(directory name)/file.vmdk

/vmfs/(lun path)/virtualdisk.vmdk

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