How to turn off Hibernation in Windows Server 2008 (get rid of hiberfil.sys)

Holy Cow. Lame (and probably in SBS and EBS 2008 I bet).

Hibernate is on by default in Windows Server 2008 and creates a hiberfil.sys file, the size of your pagefile/RAM, on the system drive (usually C:).  This meant tonight, I discovered our Exchange Server had 6GB of wasted space (seriously, when would we ever hibernate a server?) – definitely a big waste too, on a VM where we want to keep VM’s trim, etc.

Here’s a nice, quick blog entry that details it, and the first I found. http://www.expta.com/2007/09/windows-server-2008-hibernation.html

Here’s how to turn off Hibernate in Windows Server 2008 (if you get a prompt about not having permissions and you are an administrator, be sure to right click the old Command Prompt and choose ‘Run as Administrator’:

powercfg.exe /hibernate off