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 . . .
