Without this Hyper-V unfortunately is not able to compact the VHDX significantly. Go to Disk Management and shrink your partition(s) as much as possible. While defragmenting is not strictly necessary it increases the chances that the shrinking process in the next step is successful. Run Sysinternals’ Sdelete tool to zero all the deleted bits on disk: sdelete -s -z c: These simple things unearth treasures like the following:ĭo a full reboot after running Disk Cleanup because part of the removal happens when the system next starts up.

Run Disk Cleanup with admin permissions.

Start Insideīefore bringing out the heavy guns do the obvious:

For a description of how to compact Ubuntu Linux VMs take a look at this post. This article shows how to compact Windows VMs. That, however, is more difficult than it should be. The only thing left in order to regain valuable (SSD) disk space is to compact the VHDX. I know that hacks are available describing how to transfer the relevant DLLs from Server 2012 but I value my data too much to try that.

Deduplication is a great way to battle this, but unfortunately it is not available for Windows 8 Client Hyper-V. Virtual hard disks have the same tendency to grow in size as regular disks have to fill up.

Vdmx files hyper v