VMware Communities: Virtual machine keeps growing

Reply Re: Virtual machine keeps growing Jun 23, 2008 5:29 AM

powervm 82 posts since
Mar 28, 2008

How much Virtual Disk size have you assigned while creating Virtual Machine?

By default Fusion create Virtual Disk as Growable Disk. If you have assinged 80GB Virtual Disk, and it increases up to 80Gb

I think you have selected 'Split disk in to 2GB files' option with 94Gb.

Hence virtual disk files are created upto Windows-s0047.vmdk (Every disk file is 2GB)

Reply Re: Virtual machine keeps growing Jun 23, 2008 7:41 AM

in response to: powervm

stasra 39 posts since
Nov 14, 2007

Currently have 77GB occupied by virtual machine even though only 30GB actually contains data while everything else is free space. How do I tell if using split sparse disk? Would I be able to shrink after discarding snapshot? Would it still grow to 94GB over time after shrinking due to additional data being added?

Reply Re: Virtual machine keeps growing Jun 30, 2008 3:46 PM

in response to: stasra

etung 10,543 posts since
Oct 15, 2006 VMware

How do I tell if using split sparse disk?

From your description, you're using a split-sparse disk (the -sNNN indicates a split disk; the fact that you have 47 of them but are only using 77 GB of space indicates a sparse disk).

Would I be able to shrink after discarding snapshot?

You can shrink only if there is no snapshot.

Would it still grow to 94GB over time after shrinking due to additional data being added?

Maybe, depending on what's causing it to grow. Do you by chance have an automatic defragmenter or something similar running in the guest?

Reply Re: Virtual machine keeps growing Jun 30, 2008 6:09 PM

jim.gill 239 posts since
Jan 6, 2005 VMware

Are you using Vista? It reorganizes your disk whenever it considers itself idle. It's trying to optimize performance, but in a virtual machine, it ends up instantiating the entire disk. I'm not sure how to turn that feature fo Vista off yet, and it bugs me, too.

Eric, can you post another link to your Disk Management utility?

stasra, if Eric's tool supports shrinking, what you will want to do is click on the VMware Tools icon in the VM's tool tray, open VMware Tools, and "prepare for shrinking". Then use Eric's tool to shrink the disk; you'll get the unused space back.

sorry for the trouble.

Reply Re: Virtual machine keeps growing Jun 30, 2008 7:10 PM

in response to: jim.gill

WoodyZ 9,220 posts since
Apr 22, 2004

jim.gill wrote:

Are you using Vista? It reorganizes your disk whenever it considers itself idle. It's trying to optimize performance, but in a virtual machine, it ends up instantiating the entire disk. I'm not sure how to turn that feature fo Vista off yet, and it bugs me, too.

1) Click the Start button and type dfrgui and press Enter.

2) Uncheck the Run on a schedule (recommended) check box then click OK.

Eric, can you post another link to your Disk Management utility?

stasra, if Eric's tool supports shrinking, what you will want to do is click on the VMware Tools icon in the VM's tool tray, open VMware Tools, and "prepare for shrinking". Then use Eric's tool to shrink the disk; you'll get the unused space back.

Eric's vdiskmanager GUI app is just a wrapper for "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-vdiskmanager" and does not support the shrink argument "-k" like vmware-vdiskmanager in Windows does.

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Virtual machine keeps growing

Jun 22, 2008 11:42 PM

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