VMware Communities: Message List - How to resize virtual machine disk

Re: How to resize virtual machine disk

brianriceca — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 17:20:40 GMT

When I have a long conversion process to do, I usually try to let it run overnight. I'll start it 30 minutes before I go home, and check on it before I walk out the door. If the conversion hasn't failed within the first 30 minutes, the odds of it running to completion successfully are very good.

Oh, and one other tip: before you go home, check to make sure there's plenty of free space in whatever disk volume Converter's writing its results to.

Re: How to resize virtual machine disk

ozarkcanoer — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:10:05 GMT

Thanks very much brianriceca -- the info looks to be spot on. I'll read through it to see if I can understand how to resize my disk to be smaller. I'll keep in mind the possibility of rerunning the physical machine conversion. It took 10 hours when my physical machine was 54Gb. Hopefully if I delete files on the physical machine the conversion will go faster in proportion to the reduced space. I copied over most of my files from the physical XP system to my new iMac.

larry

Re: How to resize virtual machine disk

brianriceca — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 06:49:43 GMT

Hi, Larry. Tom is right: there's a document elsewhere in these forums that describes how to resize a virtual disk. I'll append a direct link below.

I should mention, though, that it's a multi-step process. You may wish, instead, to redo the VMware Converter operation, because Converter can proactively resize. You can delete the unnecessary files on the original source PC (or copy them temporarily to backup media, if you plan to keep that PC around) and then re-run the conversion, specifying the desired size for the virtual disks Converter builds.

Notice that you can change the disk size with the "New Disk Space" pulldown on the right.

Also, the files that were created by Converter were three: XP-flat.vmdk, XP.vmdk, and XP.vmx .

Your virtual disk consists of two files: XP.vmdk and XP-flat.vmdk. I wonder... when you told Converter how to make your new virtual machine's virtual disk, did you specify that the disk should be allowed to grow?

This is a great space-saving measure. Growable virtual disks take up, on your Mac OS disk drive, about as much space as their contents. Whenever Fusion needs to, it allocates more space for the virtual disk, up to the virtual disk's official stated "size" (that is, the size that Windows believes the disk really is). The tradeoff for this convenience is a small degradation in disk-write performance whenever the virtual disk needs to be grown. For most applications, this is a negligible cost.

Anyway, if you did not originally make the virtual disk growable, this might be one more reason to repeat the conversion.

You also asked about XP.vmx. This file is the definition of the virtual machine. Every virtual machine must have a .vmx file. However, Converter generates .vmx files that are slightly older than Fusion's. What a lot of people do is to use Converter to create a new virtual disk from their old physical PC, and then discard the .vmx file Converter creates. To make a new .vmx file, they'll use Fusion's New Virtual Machine Assistant, telling it to use an existing virtual disk -- the one created by Converter -- instead of creating a new blank one. Using an existing virtual disk is an option in the New Virtual Machine Assistant's Virtual Hard Disk screen, under the Advanced disk options.

Don't forget to install VMware Tools from Fusion in the new VM. The version of Tools that Converter offers to insert is not specific to Fusion.

Anyway, if you should decide to resize your already-created virtual disk instead of making a new one, here's a direct link to the document that Tom has in mind:

Resizing a Virtual Disk for Windows Guests with Step by Step Instructions

Message was edited by: brianriceca to correct a couple of places where I said "virtual machine" and meant "virtual disk"

Re: How to resize virtual machine disk

thf — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 04:09:14 GMT

Hi Larry...

I noticed no one has responded to your query. I can't answer it, never having done a resize.

Yours is a pretty common question, though - I've seen it brought up multiple times.

I just typed "resize vm" (without the quotation marks) into the "Search Community" search field up at the top of the page and got quite a few "hits", one of which was:

Resizing a Virtual Disk for Windows Guests with Step by Step Instructions

which sounds like it might work for you. Since the knowledgeable people here are usually pretty quick to jump in and help, it may be that they haven't responded due to thinking that the answer was already available.

Tom

How to resize virtual machine disk

ozarkcanoer — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 22:41:29 GMT

I used VMware converter to create a virtual machine from my physical Windows XP Pro system and have copied it to my iMac OS X 10.5.1 system with Fusion. I can run the virtual machine in Fusion and have deleted some unneeded files. Now I'd like to resize the virtual disk so it takes up less space on my OS X disk. How do I do this?

Also, the files that were created by Converter were three: XP-flat.vmdk, XP.vmdk, and XP.vmx . Do I need to keep all of these files in my documents/Virtual Machines directory?

thanks

Larry

Build number. Version 1.1.1 (72241)
What sort of Mac you have imac 24 inch (Aluminum)(Leopard 10.5.1)
Guest operating system WinXp Pro
VMWare Tools Installed - Yes
Guest Created as Conversion from Physical XP Pro system