A virtual disk is fragmented affecting the virtual machine's performance

[coopermj]

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?

[pstephenson5]

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?

[DougBaer]

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

[thomasoatman21]

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....