I'm using XenServer 5.6 as bare-metal hypervisor and CentOS 5.3 as guest OS. Because of our custom CentOS edition partitioning features, volume size required to install it fluctuate in range from 60 GB to 140 GB. As result XenServer VHD has the same enormous size. Recently there was an urgent need to start working with Templates and Appliances of XenServer, but taking into account the huge size of created images it looks almost impossible to copy/move such file.
Do you have any suggestions how to reduce created file size or compress it? May be there are some third party tools (backup/compressing tools) to overcome this problem?