I was trying to install SCVMM 2012 to manage Windows 8 beta. But unfortunately, Windows 8 Hyper-v has some major changes in services and you can’t import any Hyper-v 3 beta into SCVMM 2012 RC at this stage.
I will confirm with MS and update it later.
Well. Sorry for guys I haven’t done any updates for 2 weeks because I’m currently going through some personal issue which dramatically impact my life.
I’m trying to recover from this disaster and hope I can back on my feet soon.
Anyway, here is a small post regarding what I have found today.
We usually assign 30GB for Windows 2008 C drive from template. However, we have noticed the size of C drive has been consumed dramatically by Windows itself.
After investigating for a while, we have discovered there is a folder called winsxs under c:\windows occupies more than 11GB space.
After talking to Microsoft and we discover following fact.
“The WinSXS folder is in reality all of the operating system files. On initial install all of the files for the OS are stored here and any other instance of the files you see in the windows folder are simply hard links to the files stored in the WinSXS folder. This means we don’t need to have any duplicates of the files which is great on initial install. The issue comes that whenever the OS is serviced such as windows updates or service packs it adds the new updates to the contents of the WinSXS folder but does not remove the old components. This allows us to have good capability to uninstall, not running into any out of order uninstall issues and also allows us to always have the latest version of optional components etc. installed rather than installing a base version then needing to go back and patch it. This can and will lead to many duplicates of the same files being stored in the WinSXS which will cause it to grow in size during the life of the install. There isn’t really a method to be able to clear out these files other than by removing superseded software so that we are no longer able to uninstall back to
it. The only example I know of for this kind of functionality is for SP1 on Windows Vista which comes with an executable called VSP1CLN which makes SP1
permanent by removing all of the superseded RTM code that is replaced by SP1 components.
The behavior you are seeing with the WinSXS folder using a lot of space is not a virtualization related issue, rather it is part of the design of the Windows 2008 operating system. In light of this, using a different kind of virtualization environment to run Windows 2008 will not give different results for the WinSXS behavior.”
So this is another by design feature for MS in terms of having capability to roll back. We have decided to extend the size of OS from 30GB to 40GB instead of using tools to consolidate SP2.
Following is the procedure how you do it.
1. Extend the OS disk from 30GB to 40GB (this is ESX3.5)
2. Right click Windows disk management and right click the C drive and choose Extend Volume… (for windows 2008)
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