I tried the new Compactor beta on a XP guest system. It didn't give me chance to select which mode to use, instead just ran automatically. It took about 40 minutes to run and reboot once during the process. Just when it was about to finish, it quit with an error. The end result is very strange: my 4.6GB image becomes 5.3GB now.
It seems that compacting wasn't finished correctly. Please re-run Parallels VM Compactor again or just run built-in Compact Tool from Parallels Tools package to finileze the process. PS: Actual virtual disk size reduction performed at the last stage.
I tried both tools you suggested,but both failed. I then used Parallels Image Tool to defrag the image. It succeeded and the size reduced 2.3GB. As I used 3 programs, I don't know which one contributes most to the size reduction. By the way, what are the differences between Compactor and the built-in compacting tool?
1. Actually built-in compact feature is invoked by Parallels VM Compactor at the the end of the compacting process. And actual reduction of virtual disk size is performed by built-in compact feature in the end. 2. You can use built-in compact feature without Parallels VM Compact to reduce size of your virtual disk. But using Parallels VM Compactor give you much better results. 3. Parallels Image Tool during "defragmenting" is able to finilaze compacting procedure and able to fix some allocation errors on virtual disk as well.
Thanks! Now I undersatnd better about the product. Anyway, my end result is 50% size reduction. That's quite impressive. I'll test the Compactor with another image and post my result here.
I finally got the Compactor to run successfully on a Win XP image at the 2nd try. The size reduced from 3.3GB to 2.2GB. Still quite impressive. As all my images are new, so far I can't see any performance gain. But the size reduction will justify the product for me. I just hope Parallels can iron out all the bugs before final release. I only managed 1 successful run in 5 tries.
