ovf export big vmdk, twice as big as used space

[sasmonteiro]

Hi,

I have a Linux (CentOS5.4) guest with Oracle-XE and cleaned up tranaction logs etc by doing a backup.

The used diskspace is 5.4GiB afterwards (was 6.8GiB), and disk size is 35GiB

When I run ovftool to export, the vmdk.gz file is 11GiB!!! (ran with max compression 9)

I expected the file to be around 5.5GiB, but it's twice as big!

Is there anything I can do to make the file smaller, I need to upload it to a server on internet

cheers

[sasmonteiro]

I filled the free disk space with a zero file and then removed it, export is only 2.2GiB now! yay :smileycool:

dd if=/dev/zero of=zerofile bs=1M

sync

rm zerofile