This blog post is only valid for “Windows Server 2008” Release 1.
If you run Windows Server 2008 server in VM environment, you should know the following things.
- Hibernation feature is ENABLED by default in Windows Server 2008
- There are no GUI settings to turn hibernation off
- “hiberfil.sys” takes as much as your memory size, sitting in C: and wasting precious disk space in VM
I found out little lately that my Windows Server VMs were running out disk space and took a while to figure out what’s happening.
Solution:
You can disable the hibernation feature by command line tools. There is two step process:
1. Open command prompt in elevated mode (right click on Command prompt icon and select “Run as Administrator”). Type the following command to disable the hibernation feature.
powercfg.exe /hibernate off
2. Access your servers C: root directory from different computer (\Servernamec$) and delete “Hiberfil.sys” file. (if you try to delete this file locally on the server, you are in big surprise)
Hey best thing about this solution is NO REBOOT required. 🙂
Anand, the Architect 
ah, the deleting from an admin share – worked like a charm (why didn’t I think of that!)
You don’t actually need to delete from a remote machine. Just access it via: \\localhost\c$ 😉 That way it’s still via the admin share, but you don’t need the remote machine.
Hey, thanks for this. It saved me from crashing my virtualised Exchange server whose disk was filling with transaction logs and where the full backup still had many hours to run before the logs could be purged. Whew!