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virtual031
Contributor
Contributor
‎04-12-2015 02:34 AM

disparity in Win 8 VM disk usage

I have a Windows 8.1 VM. I dont have too much stored on there or installed anything too large. Windows reports it has used about 20GB of storage.

However, the virtual disk file on OS X is much larger, at 43GB. What's causing the extra storage? Is there some way I can free up this space?


Screen Shot 2015-04-12 at 5.22.51 AM.png

Screen Shot 2015-04-12 at 5.23.23 AM (2).png

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a_p_
Leadership
Leadership
‎04-12-2015 03:48 AM

Welcome to the Community,

physical disk space for the .vmdk file is allocated once the gust OS writes to a previously unallocated location on its virtual disk. However, once you delete files within a guest, the .vmdk file this has no effect on the .vmdk's file size. Pleas take a look at VMware KB: Defragmenting, shrinking, and cleaning up VMware Fusion virtual machine disks to see how to reclaim physical disk space.

André

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