xRM Consultant

Hey guys,

Like a lot of us i use the Microsoft Dynamics Virtual Machine Demonstration Toolkit. I have had this installed on my laptop for about 8 weeks now, giving me a development environment locally.

The size of the original image is not to bad, if memory serves around 20gb. Now i expect this to go up, but imagine my surprise when over the past few weeks i realise that it has grown to over 80gb!!!

After a bit of investigation i found that every time CRM 4.0 crashes, it creates a MDMP file in the logs folder in SQL Server. After a bit of investigation i was told that it was ok to delete these unless i needed them for diagnosis of a problem. So, delete them i did. However, after i rebooted the Virtual PC, the image was still 80gb.

Anway, i wont bore you with all the things i tried. Needless to say i have found via the following blog that to reduce it in size you need to follow the following steps:

1. Load your VPC and clear any unwanted files etc. (Make sure when you delete the files you Shift+Delete so as not to send them to recycle bin!)
2. Inside the your VPC run Virtual Disk Precompactor. This will "zero out" the data.
3. Shutdown your VPC and run the Virtual Disk Wizard. Here you will be given the option to compact the data which will reduce the VPC in size to the correct size of the image.

Hope this helps,

Joel