Please let me know if this discussion would be better for another forum.
GOAL: Package multiple, but nearly identical, VMs into a single file for download.
I have created multiple VMs for test/development work. These are specifically for VMWare Player and they may be run on a Linux or Windows host. I have Workstation, but the end-users may only have Player.
The guest OS on all of these is Linux. The VMDK itself is shrunk as much as possible, using file-to-file imaging to a new VMDK. The VMDK is about 4.5 GB.
Each virtual image only differs slightly from the others. This is either minor VMX modifications to change virtual hardware, or small changes in the installed software on the guest image. I don't want the end-user to make these changes themselves.
THE QUESTION: How can I package these so that the final compressed image is as small as possible? Anyone out there trying to do the same thing? Any multi-OS utilities out there that will properly analyze and compress the common VMDK data blocks between VMs in different directories?
I can shrink a single image with 7zip to 700MB, but shrinking 3 VMs increases this to 2.1 GB. I know that some of these VMDKs are almost identical. In fact, I've tested this with identical VMs and it simply doubles the final image size.
I've tried Zip/gzip (compression was terrible), bzip2, (OK, but 7zip was far better) and tarballing the images first, but I can't seem to get past each VM compressing individually. I've tried changing dictionary and solid block size with no major compression change.
Any help or experience with this is appreciated.
Thanks,
Jeremy