How to reduce the size of OVF file?
I am very new to OVF template feature and I created an OVF file from windows 7 VM. I created this OVF file from vSphere client (5.1) by using the export template option.
But the size the OVF file is very huge around 12 GB, but only 2GB of space is occupied by installed third party software in that VM. Not sure why OVF file is showing very huge size.
This VM have the configuration with HDD – 80GB (Thin provisioning), RAM – 20 GB and 4 vCPUs. VM belong to the ESX also having another 50 VMs with different configuration. One observation, Windows create a pagefile equal to RAM size in C:\ of the VM, so the overall utilized disk is showing as 40+ GB before export.
I used ovftool with “–compress=9” option, but still it reduced only 1 GB space, also tried with tried different option including acceptAllEulas and chunkSize, but overall size didn’t reduce.
Is there any way to reduce the vmdk file size to less than 5GB?