winntfs

Refer my earlier blog on VHDX file best practices. This blog explains the details behind how I arrived at those recommended best practices. Based upon a TechEd talk, I ran a series of experiments with VHDX files. While the investigations led to the summary published in my previous blog, there also remain some unanswered questions. So far, my attempts to find answers to these questions have remained unfruitful. Presumably the appropriate Microsoft personnel are extremely busy. Once I publish what I found, I will publish my questions as purely that – questions, in the hope that some fellow MVPs may have some insight.

For the investigation, I created a Windows 8 based guest VM running on a Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V host. I created a dynamically expanding VHDX file and attached it as a SCSI attached volume to the Windows 8 guest. The investigation consists of performing a series of operations on the Windows 8 SCSI attached volume and observing the size of the VHDX file backing that SCSI attached volume. For the purposes of this particular blog, the VHDX file was placed on an external USB spinning hard disk, which was not thin provisioning capable.

The fact that Optimize-VHD did not shrink the VHDX file was both a little surprising and disappointing, but presumably the error is mine. After numerous presentations that claimed the TRIM/UNMAP commands flowed from the guest VM into the parent partition, I was under the impression that given a Windows 8 guest OS and a Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V host, the TRIM/UNMAP commands flowed natively. Perhaps they do, and I don’t understand it. But requiring a PS cmdlet to make them flow is not what I would call native.

The next experiment I performed was to see if the VHDX file reused space freed up

Note: The implication is quite obvious. Without any intervention, the VHDX fie does not neccesarily reuse the recently freed up disk space, even when the amount of new space required is exactly equal to the recently freed up space

The next experiment I consisted of using the PS cmdlet Optimize-Volume, again with the ReTrim option.

 Note: Shutting down the VM is not really an option in production systems, but it certainly is an option for people like my fellow MVPs running VMs on their laptops.

And now, let me describe the last, but most important experiment for this blog. I expect to write more blogs on this topic.

Note: The implication again is quite obvious. Running the PS cmdlet Optimize-Volume allows the VHDX to reuse the newly freed up space.