Hi,
Does anyone know exactly what the difference is in the Defragment option available in Workstation's: VM | Settings | Hardware tab | Hard Disk | Utilities dropdown | Defragment", vs the Windows host's native defragment utility (aka defrag.exe) ?
I'm not finding any information that says WorkStation's defrag utility does anything different than the host's Window's defrag. I could guess that VMware's Defragment it possibly only defrags the VM's files, as opposed to the Windows host's defrag which defrags the host's entire volume. That might be a faster way to defragment the VM's files if saving time is your goal.
I'm assuming that Workstation's defrag is not defragmenting the (e.g.) file entire NTFS file system of a Windows Guest OS volume, or (e.g.) an Ext4 file system of a Linux Guest OS volume.
So, is Workstation's Defragment defragmenting some internal structure of the vmdk and/or snapshots? After several hours of research, I'm still clueless what Workstation's Defragment actually does.
Thank you for sharing your knowledge on this inquiry.
Regards . . .
Thanks louyo 🙂
Item "2." in the link you provided explains this perfectly.
So we can now say that this statement I made is not true and we can ignore this paragraph: "I'm not finding any information that says WorkStation's defrag utility does anything different than the host's Window's defrag. I could guess that VMware's Defragment it possibly only defrags the VM's files, as opposed to the Windows host's defrag which defrags the host's entire volume. That might be a faster way to defragment the VM's files if saving time is your goal."
My guess of "So, is Workstation's Defragment defragmenting some internal structure of the vmdk and/or snapshots?" was close, but I didn't know exactly what was happening until I read "2." in your link.
Regarding my initial quandary, I've marked your reply as Correct Answer.
Now that I understand what "VM | Settings | Hardware tab | Hard Disk | Utilities dropdown | Defragment" does, I'd like to briefly add the topic of "VM | Manage | Cleanup disks ..." to this thread. Would I be correct to say that the Cleanup Disks function is similar to the way we used service vhd files several years ago: it was a bit tedious, but basically we used a utility to write zeros to all unused space in the vhd, then there was a second utility that would compact the vhd after that, thus returning space to the host volume. I have the details of that old procedure, but I don't think we need to revisit it here.
Do you know if I'm on target with the "Cleanup disks ..." function?
Again, I appreciate your comments.
Regards . . .
Hi
Cleanup disks is different.
Please read the details about it in the documentation here:
Clean Up a Virtual Hard Disk on Windows Hosts
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Wil
Yes, that explains Disk Cleanup. Thanks Wil 🙂