Thinning virtual machine with Ubuntu 64 bit

[dontbyte]

Hi there,

according to Ubuntus "Disk Usage Analyzer" (baobab) 20,7GB of 76GB are in use at the moment (see attachments) but the VMware directory somehow is around 79 GB.

I already tried the disk utilities "Defragment" and "Compact" but sadly with no success.

Any ideas how to shrink the used disk space of the VM?

Setup:

VMware Workstation 12 Player V12.1.0 buid-3272444

Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 64-bit with 76 GB disk space

Thanks in advance!

[dontbyte]

One more info: I also tried to wipe free disk space inside Ubuntu with BleachBit.

[wila · Accepted solution]

Hi,

There are several ways to do this.

The more elaborate way is to zero out the virtual disk and then run vmware-vdiskmanager to reclaim the wiped out space.

As explained here:

Shrink guest on hosted platform - VI-Toolkit

If you have vmware tools installed however then there's another way.

run

$ sudo vmware-toolbox-cmd disk shrink /

The "/" should point to the partition that you want to shrink.

Note that you should not have any snapshots open or it will not work.

--

Wil

[dontbyte]

That worked perfectly:

$ cat /dev/zero > zero.fill;sync;sleep 1;sync;rm -f zero.fill
$ sudo vmware-toolbox-cmd disk shrink /  

THANK YOU!

[setuid]

Just a quick heads-up that using the following construct, hasn't been valid for the last few years, as `open-vm-tools` does not include the functionality of this command, and VMware has deprecated the use of VMware Tools in VMs for everything except Windows for just as long.

$ sudo vmware-toolbox-cmd disk shrink /

[RaSystemlord]

That's a pity if such a tool is missing from Player Linux-versions.

If you really need to do this, you could use evaluation version of VMware Workstation to achieve this. A slightly ugly way of doing this, but possible. You could also do this with Windows and then continue with Linux. Unfortunately, you cannot do this using directly an USB-disk, because since Ubuntu 18.04 (if we talk about LTS versions), VMware does not work with NTFS on Linux (another, long thread for this - obviously a longer story). But anyway, copies work.

[scott28tt]

You could try accessing the VMware Tools files in the repository to see what exists for your guest OS: https://packages.vmware.com/tools/releases/latest/

[RaSystemlord]

Only ancient ones are available there. Ubuntu 12.04, original release data 2012 is the latest.

For Ubuntu Long Term Support (LTS) versions, 5 years is the life of them. Nobody wants to use older, because there is no reason (this is or used to be different with Windows), only security risks are involved.