Hard disk space change? What kind of performance increase?

[dhave]

I'm running VMWare Workstation for Linux 5.x as host. My guest OS is WinXP, installed on an 8Gb slice of my host's hard disk.

If I understand correctly, Parallels Compactor cannot reduce the size of the space used on my host's hard drive, but it can improve guest OS performance by "optimizing" its filesystem. Correct?

I presume that Compactor can reduce space used on the host hard drive only for a virtual solution that uses a non-fixed size hard disk, right?

Last question: how signficant can I expect the performance increase to be if I can only benefit from filesystem optimization?

Thanks. And thanks for the trial.

 

[Andrew @ Parallels]

If I understand correctly, Parallels Compactor cannot reduce the size of the space used on my host's hard drive, but it can improve guest OS performance by "optimizing" its filesystem. Correct?

Thats correct. But the primary feature of VM Compactor is optimizing virtual disk size. I would not recommend to use it for plain (fixed size) virtual disk images.

I presume that Compactor can reduce space used on the host hard drive only for a virtual solution that uses a non-fixed size hard disk, right?

Exactly.

Last question: how signficant can I expect the performance increase to be if I can only benefit from filesystem optimization?

Its highly depends on how fresh your disk image is. It could give you performance increase for old and used virtual disk and could not for fresh just installed disk image. But it give you disk space bonus in any case.