Shrinking Vagrant Linux Boxes

So, lately I have been using Virtual Machines via Vagrant a siginificant amount as we are now using them to host our development environments and dependencies for all the development work we do. We have been using Puppet to automate the configuration of our environments and to make building our boxes easier.

Once you have provisioned a VM and you have it all dialed, you will most likely want to create a Vagrant Box from that VM and host it up on S3 so that new developers can get started simply by installing Vagrant, cloning your repository and running:

$ vagrant up

This actually works great. However, I found that the VM disks both for the Vagrant VMware Provider and the VirtualBox Provider grow dynamically, but they never shrink. So, when I was going through the process of building the VM and installing all the dependency software, etc. it was bloating the base machine. This was the case even though I removed the temporary cruft from the filesystem on the guest.

With a little research and some trial and error I found that you can shrink these disks as long as they are ext3 or ext4 file systems with the help of the following command:

$ vagrant ssh
$ sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=wipefile bs=1024x1024; rm wipefile

What the above command is doing is simply writing zero bytes to the wipefile in chunks of 1024 bytes until there is no disk space left in your VM's disk. Then it is removing the wipefile. This basically leaves all those excess bytes zero'd out.

This is necessary because the shrink/compaction tools provided by either VMWare or VirtualBox both have no way of identifying space they can free up in the disks unless they are zero'd out.

Before shrinking/compacting you should always make sure to exit the guest machine using the following commands:

$ exit
$ vagrant halt

With VMware you can shrink the vmdk disk by doing the following:

$ vmware-vdiskmanager -d /path/to/main.vmdk
$ vmware-vdiskmanager -k /path/to/main.vmdk

I discovered the above commands in the Vagrant VMware documentation, http://docs.vagrantup.com/v2/vmware/boxes.html

With VirtualBox the only way I was able to shrink the disk image was to clone it to a smaller copy using the following command:

$ VboxManage clonehd name-of-original-vm.vdi name-of-clone-vm.vdi

Once you have cloned the vdi you can then import it into the VM through VirtualBox and get rid of the original vdi.

That is how you "Shrink Vagrant Linux Boxes!"