Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Liquidware Profile Unity - vhd Compacting

Liquidware Profile Unity - vhd Compacting

names were blocked out of the image - they are not needed. Image is an example of the output. 


Both .vhd and .vhdx  are Microsoft virtual hardrive file extensions. 

Liquidware compact tool works wonders on user .vhdx profile disk files. 

In the example above we can see that the tool run a defrag on the disk. Then proceeds to compact the disk by removing white space. Whitespace will vary by user. Whitespace is space that was used by files  and then the files were deleted. The files took up space causing the virtual disk to expand but when removed, the disk remained expanded. Thin provisioned disks will do this, it is normal behavior. What the compact tool does is shrink the disk back down by removing the whitespace created by file deletions.   

Virtual Disk WhiteSpace

A virtual disk will be thin provisioned and start very small, maybe several megs to a couple of hundred. this occurs not only with Microsoft's virtual disk format of vhd and vhdx but also with virtual disks, .vmdk files,  created for vmware virtual machines. 

Sample Compacting Tool command line

the command line used for the compacting tool output shown in the screen cap is shown below. There is a configuration file that can be updated to change the location such as where the backup file is placed and the working directory. In the example, those options were provided during run time, when the command was run. 

LwL.ProfileUnity.Client.CompactVHD.exe /VHDFile \\servername\Profiles\username\ProfileDisk\username_ProfileDisk.vhdx  /WorkDir e:\CompactWorkDir\ /AcceptEULA
 
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Backup to Cloud using Veeam 

File and Folder Compression





2 comments:

Microsoft MVP said...

ProfileUnity related post I found. Asked where the base disk is if there is one for new users.
User Profile Disks for RDS 2012 / 2012 R2

GTech said...

My company had problems with new user profile disk creation after about 100 users. There was not disk space issues and the system was creating profile disks for windows users just a week earlier.