Each block has an address, called an LBA, Logical Block Address. At the disk level of storage there are no "files" there are only blocks. If that gets near, I create a new datastore and move VMs or just create the new ones on the new datastore. For example I typically create 600GB volumes (generally speaking) I leave at least 100GB free. Temp files, swapfiles, logs and for VMware snapshots. But run the command below with it anyways, and the output will tell you if you need to use a different file.If you have allocated (from ESX perspective) all your space then that's a different issue. VMDK file sitting there - normally we're looking for the plain VMDK file (named Virtual Disk.vmdk by default) without a bunch of numbers after it, but if you have snapshots associated with your VM, this might not be the file we actually want. vmwarevm "file," and select Show Package Contents to see what's really in there. If you click on this folder, though, it'll just open VMware again. Browse to wherever you've saved your virtual machines, probably somewhere in your home folder, and find the location of this ".vmwarevm" androgynous item. VMware on macOS makes this a little tricky, since it packages VMs in what looks like a ".vmwarevm" file, which is actually a folder. These directions are for macOS hosts specifically - if you're on a Linux host, I'll assume you are able to find the VMDK file, but here's some help if you need. You'll do this step outside of the virtual machine, so shut it down fully and exit VMware. #Vmware fusion free up c drive disk space windowsThe final step is to tell VMware we've done this, and manually trigger the clean up function that works so well on Windows VMs. Let it finish or else you'll be left with an actual, real file that will occupy a ton of space - the opposite of what we're trying to accomplish! Step 3: Letting VMware know we've done its dirty work #Vmware fusion free up c drive disk space updateMake sure you have the latest update through either apt or yum, and then run the following command in the guest terminal:ĭepending on how much space we're freeing, this could take a while. The open-source version of VMware Tools for Linux, open-vm-tools, has added a simple command to automate the above steps in the latest version. #Vmware fusion free up c drive disk space how toOnce you're ready, here's how to shrink your Linux-based VM: Sadly, you either need to delete them or, if you care about keeping snapshots, you can backup the VM as-is to an external disk and then delete the local snapshots. The "clean up" feature that VMware has developed for Windows guests can be applied to Linux guests as well, but it's pretty convoluted - we need to essentially clean up the VM ourselves, trick VMware to detect the free space, and manually shrink the volume.Ī tiny caveat: This only works on VMs without any snapshots. #Vmware fusion free up c drive disk space portableOn a portable machine like my MacBook Air, this can be a huge waste! On a Windows guest, VMware would be able to shrink the volume back down to 10 GB - but you'll quickly notice, annoyingly, that a Linux disk will remain at 15 GB, even though you're no longer using that much. I finish the project and delete the 5 GB of its files. Let's say that my Debian guest starts at 10 GB and I use 5 GB for my project, totaling 15 GB. If you poke around in VMware, you'll find that the clean up button is greyed-out under the settings of a Linux VM.Ĭommonly, I'll use a few gigabytes of storage for a project and then delete the files from the guest when I'm done. Either way, cleaning up virtual machines works like a charm.when you have Windows as a guest operating system with an NTFS disk.Īs a developer, I have several VMs with various Linux-based guest OSes - and, for some reason, VMware doesn't know how to optimize these. VMware can be set to automatically optimize and shrink virtual hard disks as you add and, more importantly, remove files - but this automatic "clean up" setting is disabled by default. 60 GB is simply the maximum amount of storage allowed if your guest operating system and its files amount to 20 GB, the VMDK file will simply be 20 GB. You'll notice that even if you create a virtual machine with a capacity of 60 GB, for example, the actual size of the VMDK file will dynamically resize to fit the usage of the guest operating system. On Windows virtual machines, VMware has a "clean up" function, which detects newly unused space and makes the size of the virtual hard disk smaller accordingly. VMware Workstation and Fusion normally work hard to minimize the size of virtual hard disks for optimizing the amount of storage needed on your host machine.
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