VMWare Image and Compression

compressionvmware-esxi

I acquired a VMWare image, but everything in the folder was GZipped, IE Each individual file. Now when I attempt to uncompressed the images in order to put onto an ESX machine I run out of space(They were initially >80Gb compressed to 14Gb).

Does anyone know of a decent way to import this onto an ESX machine without having to decompress the files myself?

Best Answer

Uncompress the gzip'd file onto a Windows desktop machine, and use vmware converter to shrink the disks, or basically get rid of the zero'd space at the end (which is why you are getting such a high compression rate.

Related Solutions

Enable row level compression on all tables and indexes

I've just used the Works With SQL Server Tool to test after compressing using the a_hardin-splattne script. The test failed because several indexes were not compressed.

The "sysobjects" view includes some but not all of the indexes. We need "sysindexes" instead. Thanks to the anonymous poster at aspfaq.com for this index insight. We also want to ignore user-defined functions.

SELECT 'ALTER TABLE [' + name + '] REBUILD WITH (DATA_COMPRESSION = ROW);' + CHAR(13) + CHAR(10) + 'GO' + CHAR(13) + CHAR(10) 
FROM  sysobjects  WHERE type = 'U' -- all user tables
UNION
SELECT  'ALTER INDEX [' + i.name + '] ON [' + OBJECT_NAME(i.id) + '] REBUILD WITH (DATA_COMPRESSION = ROW);' + CHAR(13) + CHAR(10) + 'GO' + CHAR(13) + CHAR(10) 
FROM 
    sysindexes i 
    inner join sysobjects o on o.name = OBJECT_NAME(i.id)
WHERE 
    (i.indid BETWEEN 1 AND 254) 
    AND (i.Status & 64)=0 
    AND OBJECTPROPERTY(i.id, 'IsMsShipped') = 0 
    AND NOT o.type in ('TF','FN')

HTTP Compression – Is It Possible to Enable HTTP Compression for Requests?

To PUT data to the server compressed you must compress the request body and set the Content-Encoding: gzip header. The header itself must be uncompressed. It's documented in mod_deflate:

The mod_deflate module also provides a filter for decompressing a gzip compressed request body. In order to activate this feature you have to insert the DEFLATE filter into the input filter chain using SetInputFilter or AddInputFilter.

...

Now if a request contains a Content-Encoding: gzip header, the body will be automatically decompressed. Few browsers have the ability to gzip request bodies. However, some special applications actually do support request compression, for instance some WebDAV clients.

And an article describing it is here:

So how do you do it? Here is a blurb, again from the mod_deflate source code: only work on main request/no subrequests. This means that the whole body of the request must be gzip compressed if we chose to use this, it is not possible to compress only the part containing the file for example in a multipart request.

Separately, a browser can request server response content to be compressed by setting Accept-Encoding header as per here:

GET /index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.http-compression.com
Accept-Encoding: gzip
User-Agent: Firefox/1.0

This will return compressed data to the browser.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Enable row level compression on all tables and indexes

HTTP Compression – Is It Possible to Enable HTTP Compression for Requests?

Related Topic