Howto compress VMware guests to save backup space
When you need to backup or move a VMware guest system, it can be a lot of data to backup, since the guests free space, is still allocated into VMware server files.
The trick is to fill up the guest systems free space with '0's that then can be compressed using a genuine compressing tool lige tar.gz
Run the following command on all the guests partitions (or at leest the once with a lot of free space)
dd if=/dev/zero of=filler bs=1000; rm filler
This command fill all the frespace of the current folder, with a single file called filler. This file is filled with binary zeroes, and then deleted when it has filled the partitions freespace.
Now when you shutdown your guest, and compress its files, you save all the free space of that guest.