Virtual machine keeps growing

[stasra]

Virtual machine keeps growing even though nothing new has been added. Have Windows-s001.vmdk through Windows-s047.vmdk under virtual machine bundle. There is one existing snapshot. What can be done to free up space?

[powervm]

How much Virtual Disk size have you assigned while creating Virtual Machine?

By default Fusion create Virtual Disk as Growable Disk. If you have assinged 80GB Virtual Disk, and it increases up to 80Gb

I think you have selected 'Split disk in to 2GB files' option with 94Gb.

Hence virtual disk files are created upto Windows-s0047.vmdk (Every disk file is 2GB)

[stasra]

Currently have 77GB occupied by virtual machine even though only 30GB actually contains data while everything else is free space. How do I tell if using split sparse disk? Would I be able to shrink after discarding snapshot? Would it still grow to 94GB over time after shrinking due to additional data being added?

[admin]

How do I tell if using split sparse disk?

From your description, you're using a split-sparse disk (the -sNNN indicates a split disk; the fact that you have 47 of them but are only using 77 GB of space indicates a sparse disk).

Would I be able to shrink after discarding snapshot?

You can shrink only if there is no snapshot.

Would it still grow to 94GB over time after shrinking due to additional data being added?

Maybe, depending on what's causing it to grow. Do you by chance have an automatic defragmenter or something similar running in the guest?

[jim_gill]

Are you using Vista? It reorganizes your disk whenever it considers itself idle. It's trying to optimize performance, but in a virtual machine, it ends up instantiating the entire disk. I'm not sure how to turn that feature fo Vista off yet, and it bugs me, too.

Eric, can you post another link to your Disk Management utility?

stasra, if Eric's tool supports shrinking, what you will want to do is click on the VMware Tools icon in the VM's tool tray, open VMware Tools, and "prepare for shrinking". Then use Eric's tool to shrink the disk; you'll get the unused space back.

sorry for the trouble.

[WoodyZ]

Are you using Vista? It reorganizes your disk whenever it considers itself idle. It's trying to optimize performance, but in a virtual machine, it ends up instantiating the entire disk. I'm not sure how to turn that feature fo Vista off yet, and it bugs me, too.

1) Click the Start button and type dfrgui and press Enter.

2) Uncheck the Run on a schedule (recommended) check box then click OK.

Eric, can you post another link to your Disk Management utility?

stasra, if Eric's tool supports shrinking, what you will want to do is click on the VMware Tools icon in the VM's tool tray, open VMware Tools, and "prepare for shrinking". Then use Eric's tool to shrink the disk; you'll get the unused space back.

Eric's vdiskmanager GUI app is just a wrapper for "/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/vmware-vdiskmanager" and does not support the shrink argument "-k" like vmware-vdiskmanager in Windows does.