A few days ago, I blogged about a tool called VM Optimizer from Invirtus (http://www.invirtus.com). Today, I downloaded an eval version to check how it works.

I must say that it works very well. I did not have older and bigger VMWare images available because my external USB disk has crashed. And of course, I did not have a backup.

I did have a newly created VM with a disk file that was about 4,5 GB in size. After running VM Optimizer, 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 colleages. 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!!!

You know how it goes. You download a piece of software that you would like to evaluate but after you install it you don't have the time to actually do the evaluation. 15 or 30 days later, you can start from scratch.

In some cases, eval software comes with a license that always ends at a certain date. Sure, you can ask for another license from the vendor, but that's annoying.

Well, when you test time-bombed software in VMWare, there is something you can do: always start a VM at a certain time and prevent time synchronization with the VMWare tools.

Just add these settings to your vmx file:

tools.syncTime = "FALSE"
tools.synchronize.continue=FALSE
tools.synchronize.restore=FALSE
tools.synchronize.resume.disk=FALSE
tools.synchronize.shrink=FALSE
rtc.startTime=1131148800

The key parameter here is rtc.startTime. That parameters sets the virtual CMOS TOD (time of day). The number you see in this example sets the CMOS TOD to November 5, 2005. The number 1131148800 is an amount of seconds since January 1, 1970. When you start up the virtual machine, the clock is set to the time specified. Each time you restart the machine, the time will be set to the time specified.

Of course, don't leave your virtual machine running for the duration time of the evaluation.

Obviously, this won't work for all types of evaluations. It also might pose problems if you need multiple virtual machines like a member server and a domain controller.