How to save VM using minimum drive space

[akus1]

Hi. Newbie here. I created a vm from a backup image. It's great but it's a lot of space. Is it possbile to save a VM without saving the VHDs? The idea would be to save time restoring future backup images to the same VM. Is this outlined somewhere in the documentation?

Thanks!

Ray

[khughes]

There hasn't really been a big push to backup workstation virtual machines from the companies that are backing up VM's of those running ESX / ESXi. The best bet I would see is what everyone else does is shutdown the VM, copy the files to a different location. If you want to save space you could probably zip the files up and compress them.

• Kyle

[continuum]

Is it possbile to save a VM without saving the VHDs?

That makes no sense at all - a VM without the vmdks is like a computer without harddisks.

Have a look at the shrink function of the vmware-tools

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[akus1]

Hey, I said I was a newbie. I thought vmware could do anything I could think of

For anyone else, the situation is that I'm testing VMWare as part of a disaster recovery solution for multiple servers.

As a test I have created a VM from a backup image (using a backup software called ShadowProtect). I have all the settings (NIC, memory) correct for the server I backed up and the data. I now know the recovered server works as a VM.

But I don't have the space to save all that old data which would just be overwritten by the new backup image if i needed to do a real recovery. Maybe I will only save the system partition.

Ray