When you delete data from Windows, the data is not actually removed from the hard disk. While this doesn’t cause too many problems for physical hard disks, it means that the virtual disks used by most hypervisors end up being much larger than necessary. In turn this means VMs take longer to backup and may even run slower.

With this in mind virtual server management specialist Vizioncore today announced vOptimizer Pro, a tool to automatically reclaim unused space in Windows based virtual machines.

Scott Herold, chief architect at Vizioncore, told The Hypervisor, “We can run this on a scheduled basis, and can also resize the NTFS partitions and then shrink the vmdk file. If you have 300 VMs and you reclaim 2GB each that amounts to a lot of expensive storage.”

Administrators can configure vOptimizer so it maintains a quota of free space in selected VMs.

Virtualized storage can often be one of the most expensive components of a virtual infrastructure, but many customers rely on educated guess work to predict their storage requirements, said Chris Akerberg president & chief operating officer of Vizioncore. “Optimizer Pro allows IT administrators to automate ongoing housekeeping on their virtualized storage infrastructure, creating highly optimized virtual machines which have smaller footprints and deliver improved performance,” Akerberg added.

Vizioncore vOptimizer Pro will be available in October 2008 at an introductory price of $495 per 5 VM license. “We feel the return of investment is significant,” added Herold.