FIM VHD is growing …and growing

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I spend a lot of time working with VMs as probably most of us in tech world nowdays. One thing I noticed about VMs is that virtual disks have tendency to grow … and grow … and grow. That’s why I often follow the procedure:

  • Run SDelete with –c switch within VM and shut it down
  • Run diskpart, then select VHD (select vidisk) and compact it (compact vdisk).

This keeps my VHDs size under control (for some degree). However I noticed that VMs with FIM are growing constantly and there is no free space to be compacted. My friend Borys from MCS (kudos goes to Borys) did a little digging on this and found this KB article: KB 941789.

As it turned out Sharepoint Services on which FIM builds its application are logging a lot of information, which can be easily deleted (past logs) and disabled from future grow with instructions from this KB. You might be surprised how much free space this will give You if Your FIM instance is running for some time.

Just a quick tip for all the FIMsters