I setup my hard drive in my VM to be 512GB thinking that I would need it. However it looks like I am only using 110GB and am wondering what is the best way to shrink the hard drive size to something lower such as 200GB so I can reclaim space for my Mac without having to delete my VM and doing a fresh install.
Very new to both Mac and VM so appreciate any guidance. Thanks.
Unless you specified "Pre-Allocate Disk Space" when creating the disk, and haven't taken snapshots, the VM should never consume more than what the guest is consuming, plus some overhead. There's a "cleanup disk" button in the Fusion UI to reclaim some of that overhead if possible. (VM Settings > General > "clean up virtual machine")
Can you verify the size of your .vmwarevm file/bundle?
inside the guest, if you type 'disk cleanup' into the windows search bar, then right click on it and 'run as administrator' you can potentially free up a lot of space, particularly after some of the recent windows updates that preserve the previous version. Then run the reclaim function again - I took a VM from 80GB to 40 GB the other day doing this.
Highly recommend making a backup of the VM before doing it - it's not reversible.
Bump - any takers or is this impossible?
Unless you specified "Pre-Allocate Disk Space" when creating the disk, and haven't taken snapshots, the VM should never consume more than what the guest is consuming, plus some overhead. There's a "cleanup disk" button in the Fusion UI to reclaim some of that overhead if possible. (VM Settings > General > "clean up virtual machine")
Can you verify the size of your .vmwarevm file/bundle?
Okay thanks for the feedback and this makes me feel better; thanks for clarifying.
I think I'm all set then:
Pre-Allocate Disk Space is not checked.
All reclaimable file is reclaimed.
.vmwarevm file is close to what is taken up by guest OS.
inside the guest, if you type 'disk cleanup' into the windows search bar, then right click on it and 'run as administrator' you can potentially free up a lot of space, particularly after some of the recent windows updates that preserve the previous version. Then run the reclaim function again - I took a VM from 80GB to 40 GB the other day doing this.
Highly recommend making a backup of the VM before doing it - it's not reversible.
Perfect - this helped a bunch. Thanks!