Captured Image File Size

[Eric]

Hello,

I'm having a peculiar issue. I've a VM that I've captured an image of and the its size is under 10 GBs. I found that some small apps were missing; installed them and captured the image. The new image was still under 10 GBs. Found that the VM need some configurations modded. Did that and captured another new image. Over 13 GBs in size! These are all new images, not differencing, or over-writing, existing images. 

I've tried compacting the VM and clearing temps and log files, but I'm still getting the much larger file size. 

Anyone else experiencing this issue.

Thanks, 

Eric

[SmartDeploySupport]

Hi Eric,

The WIM file format uses a technology and structure known as "single-instance storage", wherein any files that are binary-identical are only stored once. As a result, the WIM file is usually smaller than the virtual hard disk that it was captured from, as there's generally some redundancy between files. I can't speak to the specific updates or software that you might have installed, but this sort of expansion of the WIM file is pretty common when files are changed - where one copy of a file may have sufficed before, now (with slight alteration), two copies of the file may exist, and as a result, the WIM file would be larger by that amount. Repeat a few thousand times, and you end up with a much larger file.

The WIM file format does support the storage of multiple images, so if you're looking to save a bit of disk space, you can store your images in the same WIM file, and they will generally take up less space than the separate files, as most of the OS files will be identical between them (as long as they're the same OS version).

If you have any other questions, feel free to reach out - support (at) smartdeploy.com

SmartDeploy Support Team

 

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