ESXi VM Not Reducing in Size

[TIMETRIAD]

Hello,

I'm experimenting with ESXi 7.0.2 before I run it on a dedicated BMS. I wanted to play around with it by running it in within VMware Workstation 16.

To save space on my laptops NVMe drive, I deleted the two VMs that I created, but the ESXi VM itself is not getting any smaller on the Windows file system. I checked the size before deleting the VMs and the size hasn’t changed even after I deleted the two VMs. I even restarted the ESXi VM, but that didn't reduce the size of the ESXi VM itself. I did confirm that the VMs from within ESXi Vm have been purged from the datastore. The events indicate they were "destroyed" and in the datastore explorer, they are completely gone. Although the storage is reclaimed within the ESXi VM, my physical drive tells me a different story.

I'm concerned that as I create more VM's from within the ESXi VM, that as I delete them, they will not free up space on my actual hard drive. Keep in mind I am running ESXi within a Type 2 hypervisor (Workstation 16).

[scott28tt]

Deleting a VM doesn't make the ESXi VMFS datastore any smaller, I don't believe Workstation would know that you've deleted data within that.

[TIMETRIAD]

... accidental duplicate post ...

[TIMETRIAD]

Well, that's unfortunate.

It looks like I'll have to rebuild from scratch every time I get low on physical storage space.

I just purged that ESXi VM yesterday and started over. I think I'll run another experiment. Maybe I can delete the VM using the remote connection from within Workstation. I saw the options, but I'm not sure if it will work.

Considering both products are VMware, and ESXi is supported in Workstation, I wonder why VMware wouldn't know when storage is freed up in the ESXi. Either way, it looks like I've got some experiencing/learning to do.

Thanks for your insight Scott. It's much appreciated.

[IRIX201110141]

Well....   instead of creating a VM with only one vDisk where you install a virtual ESXi into you can create 2 or more vDISKs so your ESXi see different Datastores. When needs some space you can delete the VMs and Datastore as well and when shutting down ESXi you can remove/recreate the vDisk within VMware Workstation.

Another solution would be "external" storage for your virtual ESXi. iSCSI will not help (well....)but if youre able to setup NFS on your "Host" it will give you the control to your disk resources.

Regards,
Joerg