I get a message every time at shutdown of my WinXP virtual machine:
A virtual disk is fragmented affecting the virtual machine's performance
To improve performance, defragment the following virtual disk(s): ide0:0.
After you power off the virtual machine, go to Virtual Machine Settings, select the virtual disk and click the Defragment button.
The issue is I don't think the virtual disk is fragmented. Windows doesn't think so, but I did a defrag anyway. Still got the message.
According to iDefrag, this vmdk has 1,496 fragments, but my CentOS vmdk has 11,254 fragments and I don't get the warning there.
Does this mean the virtual disk file is insufficiently contiguous or a bug?
Yup, I get this too but it doesn't seem to happen at every shutdown. I wonder if it's because my vm is in my user folder which is file vaulted?
This message shows up in Workstation for Windows as well. The fragmentation is not within the guestOS, but with the actual VMDK file as stored on the host machine. I generally get this when the disk is set to allocate-on-demand rather than preallocated. If I'm using the VM for testing, I generally ignore the message -- if I'm using the VM to actually do work in another OS, I usually preallocate the disk file to eliminate/reduce such fragmentation.
doug
Hi. I see this message sometimes and I am running on a fast NVMe SSD.
So I am curious how important the message is...
and, how did it detect this? I was under the impression that fragmentation on an SSD should not really change performance....