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Hot Shot
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Why not explaning virual hard disks ?

Why doesn't Fusion do expanding Virtual hard drives and not plain?  eg... after installation of Windows 7 including SP1 on install, included and a few apps. the VM on the Mac is 11 Gig at the minimum (no windows updates) applied..

I tried "Clean space" in VM general setting but it didn't help, as all that does is remove "un-used" space... Since the default creation of a virtual hard drive is quite large to begin with

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dariusd
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

VMware Fusion uses expanding virtual hard disks by default.

I installed a fresh Windows 7 x64 VM here, and it uses 10.5 GBytes of host disk space while running, and used an expanding 60 GByte hard disk by default.

2 GBytes of that host disk space was used for the ".vmem" file, which is the storage for the virtual machine's RAM/memory contents, and only exists while the VM is running.  If I power down the VM, its disk usage on the host decreases to 8.5 GBytes.

If I power on the VM and examine the hard disk contents, it shows 9.88 GBytes of disk space is actually being used by the guest.  (Less than we're using on the host?  Interesting.  If Windows writes a block of zeroes to the disk, we won't necessarily use space for it on the host, even though the guest will consider it "used" space.)

Running "Disk Cleanup" in the guest only offers to free up 1 MByte of disk space.

Add/Remove programs shows that VMware Tools is using ~100 MBytes of disk space, and some .NET omponents are using a few hundred kBytes of space... The rest is just Windows.

So it looks like Windows 7 simply uses a lot of disk space...  The "Turn Windows features on or off" section of Control Panel might allow you to free up some more disk space.

I don't think there is much more that Fusion could do to reduce Windows 7's disk usage other than to start compressing the disk's contents.

Cheers,

--

Darius

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