Andrew Dugdell, Microsoft MVP, ANZ

“Having separation of functionality for the Desktop and Network editions really appeals to me. I can easily get the functionality I need out to the guys in the field. With the enterprise functions of the Network edition I can use it here in the Data Centre and really get more value from the virtual machines in my environment.”

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Scott Hanselman, Chief Architect at the Corillian Corporation, MSDN Regional Director for Portland, OR

“I've got a pile of demo VMs that I and others work on and once they're all setup they tend to get pretty big. After some work recently an 8 gig VM ballooned to nearly 10 gig! There's all sorts of tips and tricks on how to compact VMs, usually by defragging and zero'ing out free space. However, I don't have the time to do this kind of stuff manually, and when I DO run through these processes manually I'm rarely satisfied with the results.

vOptimizer is a clever little tool that solved this particular problem. After it executed, I ran the Virtual Disk Wizard that comes with Microsoft Virtual PC (vOptimizer works on VMWare also) and compacted the 9.9 gig VM down to 3.4 gigs in another 10 minutes. So, a total of 30 minutes later I had a VM that was 1/3 the size, ran faster and now fits on a single-layer DVD when the original one wouldn't have fit on even a dual-layer one.

Here's what I can say about vOptimizer - It did exactly what they said it would do! Always nice to have software work EXACTLY as advertised. Frankly, I would have been thrilled with a 50% size reduction, and was VERY surprised to get 66% as a bonus. I use VMs all the time and the price is a no brainer.”

Learn more about Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com blog

Joe Homnick, MCT, MCSD.Net, MCDBA, MCSE, MCAD, MVP ASP.Net, CPA and Microsoft Regional Director for Florida

Recently Joe said “We work extensively with VPCs in our training business and thought we had learned everything there was to know about optimization and compaction. However, the vOptimizer consistently added 1/3 more compaction compared to our procedures and added more speed over our optimization scheme. Definitely recommend this product to anyone who works with Virtual PC.”

Learn more about Vinod and other Microsoft Regional Directors

Mont Rothstein, VP Product Development with Foray Technologies

Recently Mont said “We had a bare Windows XP install with nothing more than updates from Microsoft. It was a 5.3 GB virtual hard disk with 4 GB of data. After using  vOptimizer the virtual hard disk was less than 1 GB! Not sure how they do it, but it is amazing.”

Erik Enger, Systems Consultant in the US, uses Microsoft Virtual PC, VMware Workstation 5.5 and VMware GSX Server 3.2.1.

Recently Erik said “I use both Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 and VMWare Workstation 5.5 and have experienced great results so far. I have achieved about a 70% or more reduction in the sizes of my VMs and following the helpful hints in further optimizing my VMs, the performance has improved too. It’s nice to finally be able to burn more than one VM to a DVD.”

Erik also provided us with the following table which shows his results.

	Before  vOptimizer	After vOptimizer	Space reduction
XP Pro	4,928,110,592	1,236,008,960	75%
Windows 2003 SE	4,337,172,480	1,304,494,080	70%
Windows 2003 EE	4,196,466,688	1,279,787,008	70%

Sanjay Shetty, CEO, Wireless Strategist and Microsoft Regional Director for Mumbai India

Recently Sanjay said “Jaw dropping, is the only word I can use to describe the reduction in size, I honestly thought it might cut down size of my virtual hard disks by about 1GB or so, but 3 times more is what it achieved with the first of my VPC’s. I can certainly recommend vOptimizer  for everybody working with virtual hard disks. It’s a must have tool”.”

Learn more about Sanjay and other Microsoft Regional Directors

Jonas Hogstrom, R&D Engineer for a software company in Sweden, uses VMware Workstation.

Recently Jonas said “In my tests I optimized three virtual machines. A Windows Server 2003 virtual machine with Sybase went from 2.1gig to 1.3gig. A Windows Server 2003 virtual machine with MySql went from 2gig to .9gig and a physical machine image with a Lotus Notes install which was recently converted with P2V went from 8.6gig to 3.9gig. Before these VMs would not even fit on a DVD when compressed, now there is room to spare without compression.”

Trond Brande, CTO of Objectware and Microsoft Regional Director, Norway, uses Virtual PC.

Recently Trond said “As a frequent beta tester of many Microsoft products, I usually have 5-10 different VPC images loaded on my laptop. Size and speed of these images are very important for me to get the job done efficiently. vOptimizer  is the tool I depend upon to give me both greatly reduced size and increased performance of my arsenal of VPC images. Warmly recommended for anyone that works professionally with VPC images.”

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Lorenzo Barbieri, Microsoft Certified Trainer, MCSD.NET and MCDBA in Italy, uses Microsoft Virtual Server and Virtual PC

Recently Lorenzo said "It’s really easy, you start the program, it prepares everything for the compaction, than you start the Virtual Disk Wizard and do the final step. It’s much better than finding the right files to delete, defragment the virtual hd, pre-compact it and the do the final step. I can fit much more VM in my notebook hd, without using an external one. I can also fit more VM inside a DVD-R for Backup. I also succeeded in compacting a VM and fitting it inside a CD-R. I’m a Microsoft Certified Trainer, and using vOptimizer I can deploy VMs faster on classroom’s PCs. Sometimes I can deploy them the same morning of the course, without preparing the classroom the day before. When I setup classrooms, normally I’ve to do the afternoon before the course, or the Friday before the course. Doing the work the same morning, from 8.30am to 9.30pm, I can save an afternoon every two or three weeks. Assuming 500€ per day of teaching, this means between 200€ and 600€ per month. It’s a great product. It changed the way I use Virtual Machines, drastically improving the experience. As far as results, I've compacted a VPC2004SP1 VM with Windows® Server™ 2003 + SP1 and VM Additions from 3.2Gb to 1Gb. I really liked the all-in-one approach and am very happy with the outcome. I've compacted another VM from 6Gb to 3Gb and another from 1.8Gb to 640Mb and it's very useful. The boot sequence seems faster, and the VMs are very easy to backup now. I'm really amazed!”

Laurent Kempé, Microsoft MVP from France, uses Microsoft Virtual PC

Recently Laurent wrote "Installation was so easy and the result is that now my previous 8.5Gb VM is now 5Gb and loads faster. Great tool!!!!"”

Brannon M., Senior Systems Engineer for a Major software firm in the US, uses Microsoft Virtual PC

Recently Brannon wrote “I have the business need to have many different virtual machines available to me as part of my job as a technology specialist who covers a broad array of technologies. I am consistently seeing 40% reductions in the size of vhd files and the ability to reduce my virtual disks by 40% has allowed me to have almost twice as many demo scenarios at my disposal. As a result I can carry twice as many virtual machines on my laptop in preparation for adhoc demo scenarios. This allows me to put much less preparation effort into what I will need beforehand and negates the need for me to schedule follow-up meetings with the customer if the discussion strays into areas I did not specifically prepare for. I found the product extremely easy to use for one familiar with the manual process for doing compaction, and I did not experience any problems at all. The only caution I would point out is to make sure to enable your VHD’s for saving beforehand, as I began the process of compaction a few times only to realize I could not save changes to my session.”

Joseph Cooney, Senior Consultant and Microsoft Certified Solution Developer in Melbourne Australia, uses Microsoft Virtual PC

Recently Joseph wrote “I'm a pretty big fan of virtualization, so I was interested in ' vOptimizer product when I first heard about it. Its an application that runs inside your virtual OS and deletes un-necessary files, defragments your virtual hard-drive and makes other improvements to help reduce the size and increase the speed of your virtual OS. Recently I downloaded the 14-day trial to see if this technology really worked. I was able to cut down my 6GB XP+Weblogic VPC image to around 1.8 GB. I'm optimizing a few other VPC images now to see if I can get the same gains again. Overall a very nice and easy-to-use product, that makes backing up, moving around and sharing virtual machines very easy.”

Bernard Opic, Microsoft MVP, uses Microsoft VPC and Virtual Server

Recently Bernard wrote “For some time I have sought a means of significantly reducing the size of my VPCs. On 8 of my VPCs I recovered greater than 40 gigabytes with vOptimizer. DVD storage is now easy and possible whereas before it wasn't and and moving VPCs around is now a simple matter.”

Todd Carlson, Windows Engineer at HB Fuller Company in the US, uses Microsoft Virtual PC

Recently Todd wrote “vOptimizer saved me a lot of wasted time. My project manager wanted his 23GB master image put onto disk which wasn’t possible until I used vOptimizer. Now the VM is less than 7GB. Anytime you can reduce the size of a file like this there is a savings and convenience. Built in compaction tools don’t have the results that make compacting worth wile. This tool rocks!”

Jeffrey Weinstein, Network Engineer with QualityConnectMD® in the US, uses Microsoft Virtual PC

Recently Jeffrey wrote “Storage space and transfer time have been dramatically improved. Awesome! We can now store multiple VMs on a DVD instead of not being able to fit one at all. My original VPC was 5,860,793 KB and after vOptimizer is 1,462,664 KB. Efficiency has increased dramatically.”

Geert Baeke, Technology Consultant for Xylos in Belgium, uses Microsoft VPC and VMware ESX

Recently Geert said “Today, I downloaded an eval version to check how it works. I must say that it works very well. I did have a newly created VM with a disk file that was about 4,5 GB in size. After running vOptimizer, the size came down to 1,4 GB. After compression, I had a zip of around 700 MB. This makes VMs so much more portable for distribution to colleagues. It may also solve my storage problems because I have many VMs to play with. This tool is really a great way to optimize the size of your virtual disks. To me, it works way better than the native shrink tools provided by VMWare and Microsoft. Highly recommended!!!”

Clayton Hinkle, Mgr, SAP Basis/DBA, uses VMware

Recently Clayton said ““I had heard all the great stories that it was impressive but nonetheless I didn't get my hopes up. I have heard hype before. But...the product was very easy to use...my virtual disk went from 2.9 GB all the way down to 1.13 GB. Very impressive indeed! I was shocked it performed this well. Great job guys!”

Gini Khalsa, MCT/MCSE, uses Microsoft VPC and VMware

Recently Gini said “Prior to  vOptimizer, I was not able to store archival images of my VMs without using multiple DVDs. Now I am able use Winzip to compress them to self-extracting executables and store them on a single 4.3 GB DVD along with the operating system ISOs, with room to spare for references. Additionally, as an instructor, I can't often carry around portable drives, using  vOptimizer the same DVD holds images for several classes. For less than 60 bucks - this is a must-have tool for VM professionals.”

Robert McLaws, Microsoft MVP, uses Microsoft VPC and Virtual Server

Recently Robert wrote “Recently lots of people have been talking about ' vOptimizer . I heard so many great things about it, I decided to check it out. My dev VM had swelled to about 9GB, which made it really hard to defragment the rest of my hard drive with. I had to keep copying it to an external drive, defrag it there, and then copy it back. What a pain. So I gave VMO a shot, and I was very happy with it overall. It took less than an hour to run on my VM, rebooting at least 2x along the way. By the time it was done, and I ran the VPC compactor wizard, my VHD was compacted down to about 3.5GB... a much more manageable size. That's with VS2005, SQL 2005, all the docs, Office 2003, and a bunch of other crap. Very impressive, to say the least. When I ran it on a clean WS2003 R2 virtual install, it took the VHD size from 3.2GB to 950MB... which made it far easier to upload to my servers. If you work with VPCs a lot, you should definitely check it out.”

Vinod Unny, CEO, Enterprise InfoTech and Microsoft Regional Director for North India

Recently Vinod said “I am pleasantly surprised to realize significant size reductions of my virtual hard disks even after they that had been previously defragged, pre-compacted and compacted. I have 8-12 VPCs with me all the time; the size reduction I get from this tool is very substantial. For anyone working with virtual machines, vOptimizer  is an essential tool.”

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Jack Carnes, Sr. Certified Consulting IT Specialist, IBM Corporation

Recently Jack said “vOptimizer worked great in testing. Reduction in image size and especially performance enhancements were a great help. I am buying. Thanks!”

Corrado Crovetto, Principal Consultant, MCSE Win2k, MCSE Win2003, Avanade in Italy

Recently Corrado said “Having smaller, faster VMs helps me deploy VMs more quickly across customer networks, and allows backing up of images to be more efficient. Also, using vOptimizer means that I can have more VMs on my hard drive that I carry around for demos, etc. This means I can be more prepared when a customer says "I've heard about such and such feature on SQL 2005; do you have a demo?"

As a systems engineer, virtualization is a cool thing and is frequently used for learning new products, for testing or for demos. Because my VMs are small, due to vOptimizer I can send them to other consultants in other delivery centers without having to wait indefinitely for some bandwidth.  Greatly enhances this experience by allowing me to automatically shrink my sysprepped VMs and distribute them on slower links or smaller portable disks."

Rodney Fournier, Microsoft MVP - Windows Server - Clustering Windows Server 2000/2003 MCSE: Security/Messaging MCSA 2000/2003: Security/Messaging MCSE + Internet (NT 4.0), MCSE 3.5 HP/Compaq ASE, CTT+, MSS, LCP A+, Network+, Server+, i-Net+, Security+

Recently Rodney said “I use Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 R2 for all my public talks and training sessions. We teach from VM's and your product saved 6.5 GB off a 15 GB VM, that is a huge difference. I am a very satisfied customer and Microsoft Windows Server Clustering MVP."