All options missing in VMware Tools?

[BHuntsman]

Anyone know why VMware Tools has no options from the GUI, and I now have to shrink my disks via the command line?

That's unbelieveably craptastic.  What's with the industry trend these days of "simplifying" things by removing features?  It used to be that people *added* useful features to products that were sold for good money, not *removed* useful features...

[aprabhas]

The options for the Tools UI has been removed in Fusion 5 and also in many other latest versions of VMware products. Also, you don't have to always go to the command line to do shrink disk, instead doing a clean up disk from the Settings>General does the shrink too. So is the time synchronisation which you can now find in the Settings>General too if I am not wrong.

And I am pretty much sure that VMware would have bought in this change for something good as Tools is a part of all the VMware virtualization suites.

[RJIn]

Hi,

Yes, in Fusion 5 clean up does the same. But if you want to to a advacned shrinking can look the link below.

(http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2033583)

[BartP]

aprabhas wrote:

The options for the Tools UI has been removed in Fusion 5 and also in many other latest versions of VMware products. Also, you don't have to always go to the command line to do shrink disk, instead doing a clean up disk from the Settings>General does the shrink too. So is the time synchronisation which you can now find in the Settings>General too if I am not wrong.

And I am pretty much sure that VMware would have bought in this change for something good as Tools is a part of all the VMware virtualization suites.

The issue is that settings > general doesn't do the 'zero wipe' needed to actually shrink the disk.  You need to either use the (hard to find and poorly documented) command line tools or third party tools to perform to zero fill the free space before you can shrink now.

This is a HUGE step backwards, especially for the non-technical users that use prebuilt images that need to be shrunk from time to time due to limited disk space.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Hmmm, I'm able to reclaim space just fine by doing the commands from the Fusion library, when it shows reclaimable space.

It does seem (no data, just an impression) that it doesn't shrink as far as the old command, but that usually was a one-time thing anyway (next time the VM booted, it was back to about where it is now).

[jim_gill]

Settings -> General doesn't do the zero wipe because it doesn't have to. For NTFS-formatted virtual disks, which cover most of the guests in the field, shrinking reads the guest's allocation bitmap and shrinks the virtual disk file by removing every disk segment that maps to unallocated guest data. The new method is more powerful, because it not only succeeds if you've got a VM snapshot, but shrinks all snapshot virtual disks as well. The Tools zero-wipe simply didn't run if your VM had a snapshot.

The command-line tools expose zero wipe for Linux guests and FAT/HFS+ guests, but continue the legacy policy of you-can't-do-it-if -you-have-a-snapshot.

[BartP]

Jim Gill wrote:

Settings -> General doesn't do the zero wipe because it doesn't have to. For NTFS-formatted virtual disks, which cover most of the guests in the field, shrinking reads the guest's allocation bitmap and shrinks the virtual disk file by removing every disk segment that maps to unallocated guest data.

That is not what I am seeing.  I ran the Settings > General > Shrink several times and it never got the image size below 30GB when actual space used on disk was ~15GB.  I used sys internals to do a zero wipe of free space and after that the shrink actually took the drive size down to ~15GB.  This is on an NTFS drive.  Seeing this same behavior under Fusion and Workstation.