Solution to decrease virtual disk space usage in host OS?

[leventeliu]

After long-term usage, one of my virtual disks seems to be irreversibly taking much more space in its host OS than actual usage in the guest OS. Since my laptop has only 1TB disk and no way to add other disks for now, I have to find a way to solve this before it consumes all disk space up.

Here is some information:

Product	VMware® Workstation 16 Pro 16.2.5 build-20904516
Host OS	Windows 11 Pro
Guest OS	Linux 5.15.114-2-MANJARO
Disk type	0 (single growable virtual disk)
Snapshots/disk chain	none
Disk usage in Guest	92G
Disk format in Guest	1 primary partition of etx4, 500GB capacity
Disk file usage in Host	244G

What I have tried: defragmenting and shrinking, multiple times, it seems 244G is the best I can get.

Maybe another solution: create a new disk, partition, format, mount, and copy data from the old disk. I tried this on another smaller and irrelevant disk and it works fine - the newly created disk file takes 9G while its disk usage is 8.9G in the Guest OS, but it's the last thing I want to do with my home data disk.

Any better idea?

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

>>> defragmenting and shrinking, multiple times, it seems 244G is the best I can get.

Did you zero out the guest file system (unused disk sapce)  before trying to shrink the virtual disk?

André

[leventeliu]

Oh, this sounds like the missing piece of my puzzle, I should try it later, thanks!

[hadjer1]

Hello,

If you disk is thin provisioned try to reclaim space. https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Workstation-Pro/17/com.vmware.ws.using.doc/GUID-421A1073-BF16-4BC7...

If you disk is thick provisioned ("reserve the whole space" when created), then use VMware converter to transfrom the VM disk into thin provisioned, here is an example of a VM in my laptop (I show only the step where you change the disk to thin provisioned) :

If you need more explanation ping me.

[leventeliu]

From the article you provided:

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...

Prerequisites

• Verify that you are using a Windows host and that the guest operating system uses NTFS. (NTFS is standard in Windows XP or later operating systems.) This feature works on all NTFS hard disks but reclaims more disk space if the operating system is Windows XP or later.

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My guest OS is not using NTFS so this doesn't seem to be the right solution.

[leventeliu]

This is the right answer, the key point is that wmware's tool does not deal with different guest filesystems, I was always wrong about this😆