I have been using Parallels Desktop for Mac on my Macbook for a while and it has been working fine. I have 4 VMs (2 Windows 2000, 2 Windows XP) on my Macbook. After all this time I notice that although I have only installed a few software inside them, the total size of the 4 VMs have increased to 12GB. In particular the Chinese Windows XP VM occupies nearly 4GB when the total hard disk space occupied should be roughly 2.5 GB. So I start to look for some way to reduce its size. I remember I have read here about a certain person reporting that he/she used Acronis True Image to clone the VM and thereby reducing its size. I decided to try it. First I experiment with the VMs running under VMware WorkStation on my Windows PC. I add a second empty hard disk image to a VM containing a Windows hard disk image and then use Acronis (running from a Bootup CD image) to clone the Windows hard disk image to the new empty hard disk image. As expected the size of the image was significally reduced (by over 1GB) and the clone boot successfully. I then proceed to do the same to each of my Parallels VM on my Macbook. The cloning was successful in each case and the total size of the VMs was reduced from 12GB to about 8GB. I am quite satisfied at the results. If you have a Windows disk cloning program such as Ghost or Acronis you can also consider using them if you wish to reduce the size of your Parallels or VMware VMs. I have never used the Compact feature in Parallels (which is supposed to do the same thing) and I think I won't, now that Acronis works well for me.
