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smart compression of virtual machine images

Virtual machine disk images typically contain many unused virtual disk sectors. Currently, to get good compression, I have to first 'shrink' the virtual machine disk image then compress the shrunken image. The University of Utah has a BSD licensed 'imagezip' software that understands various filesystems and skips compressing unused blocks when compressing an entire filesystem. This makes compressing and uncompressing much faster of physical volumes and greatly reduces the image size. This technology could be used on the slightly more complicated virtual disk format of virtual machine images to greatly increase compression speed.

mheyman , 23.01.2011, 14:15
Idea status: under consideration

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