How to Reduce Virtual Machine Disk Space - When Your Host Disk is Full!?

[yesmarty]

Running:

Mac OS Lion (10.7.2)

VMWare Fusion 3.

My 200GB Macbook Pro ran out of space - I had about 1GB available, and after a complete wipe and reinstall of my mac I ended up with 10GB. Upon checking the virtual machine I was astounded to see it hogging 80GB when all there is is a couple of light programs & a few files running on XP.

I tried to follow these instructions from the VMWare support site to clean and shrink the VM's footprint within my Mac (3 steps - defragment the disk within Windows, shrink the virtual disk using VMware Tools, and then clean up the virtual disk from within Mac OS using the built-in Fusion utility), but cannot because I don't have enough space on my Mac hard drive to allow for the processes to occur. Apparently you need as much space available on the host drive to defrag/shrink as the size of the VM itself! Seeing as I have 1GB and the VM is sitting at 80GB I am totally stuck.

I have a 1TB external HD that I have been using to do my Time Machine back-ups with. I don't use it for anything else.

Can I somehow perform this defreg-->shrink-->clean-up using the available space on the 1TB external HD?

Does anyone know how I can achieve the desired reduction in my VM's size, given these factors?

Many thanks,

Marty.

[ColoradoMarmot]

Most likely you have autoprotect turned on, turn that off first, then delete all the snapshots.

If not, you may have preallocated the virtual disk.

[MauroBonder]

Hi,

May this article can be useful for you - http://www.robvanhamersveld.nl/?p=359

Good luck

Please, don't forget the awarding points for "helpful" and/or "correct" answers.

Mauro Bonder - Moderator

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[ranjitcool]

Am not really super familiar with fusion environment but may be you built the vm as thin disk and the vm grew? You do mention not many files.

Any screenshots we can look at. Are there any log files filled up?

Okay first what I would do is power down the vm and move it to the Terabyte hdd. Then you should be able to power it up and shrink from there.

I really don't see a reason why anything will fail by you doing a cp -a that files. I would remove and re add that vm as well or update the vmx to look in the new disk (i never tried this but again cant think of why it wont work).

Please, don't forget the awarding points for "helpful" and/or "correct" answers.

RJ

[yesmarty]

thanks dlhotka,

yes, i think the VM is pre-allocated (40GB) but has somehow grown to 85GB!

Autoprotect has always been OFF; I have deleted the couple of snapshots I had, emptied trashes etc.

I'm pretty sure that I pre-allocated the disk to 40GB upon installation of the virtual machine.

Will I be able to just drag the 85GB VM folder into an external hard drive and do the clean-up and shrinking there? If it is the 1TB HD I am using for my Time Machine backups, will the Mac OS still drive the operations in the external drive, as well as enable XP to function within the VM for purposes of clean-up on that external HD?

Below are 2 screenshots:

This one showing the VM size in my Mac:

this one is of the VMWare tools snapshots window - no snapshots.

[yesmarty]

thanks ranjitcool. i'll try exporting the clean and shrink operation onto an external drive.