Comments on: Shrink your Windows disk image on VMWare Fusion (Mac)

By: VMWare Fusion - Vista or XP | Rusty's Technology Blog

VMWare Fusion - Vista or XP | Rusty's Technology Blog — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 19:21:36 +0000

[...] Here is a great post about how to shrink your VMWare fusion disk image [...]

By: Daimeon

Daimeon — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 02:55:12 +0000

Ummm, easier way…VMware tools installed on the client. There’s this really neat tab that says “Shrink” Highlight the drive you want to compress, then click “prepare to shrink” then it does it all for you.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 21:11:22 +0000

Could you give an example of what a correct path might be, I’m trying this but I’m getting a file not found:

./diskTool -k 0Users/myusername/Documents/Virtual Machines/Windows XP Professional.vmwarevm/Windows XP Professional-SCSI_0-0.vmdk

By: Marcus

Marcus — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 20:23:40 +0000

Right now I want to throttle you. This article just killed my VM and my Mac.

When I create a VM I always choose a big HD size i.e. 100Gb but don’t let it reserve that space. That way you don’t end up with a machine that one day is capped for disk space (happened to me too many times). Back in the day we created VMs with a 20GB drive thinking that would never get exceeded. Now I build them 100GB. When you disk zero it tries to write the whole f***king 100GB and if you dont have that on the Host then bye bye disk space.

Annyed at you but more at myself for not forseeing it. I fucking hate VM’s somedays.

By: iDork

iDork — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 23:03:15 +0000

I tried the “manual” procedure in a Windows 2000 Pro VM in VMware 1.1.3 and I got an error running the zeroing utility.
Using the built-in shrinking utility (after defragmenting) I was able to reduce the VM bundle size from 2 704 873 255 bytes to 952 248 277 bytes. I did a “clean” installation of Windows 2000 Pro and then installed WinRAR, eTrend (and updated the signature) and applied SP4 (all from a CD).

By: Eric A. Duncan

Eric A. Duncan — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 02:32:53 +0000

Humm. This doesn’t seem to do anything on mine. I enter the command, and I get the prompt immediately.

I believe this solution is only for dynamic disks, which I regret not creating in the first place. When i converted other laptop to a Virtual Machine disk to use in Fusion (and that was SWEET btw!), I selected the Allocate all space now option - which is suppose to increase performance, but not being dynamic.

Now, I am sitting on a 93 GB vmdk - that only has 23 GB in use.

I’ll try searching a bit more about to find out how to convert it to a dynamic disk. Right now, the only option I have found instructs you to use a Windows machine - which I do not have for a bit. Grrr.

By: mmc

mmc — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 18:29:09 +0000

tung: With my manual procedure I got about 50% reduction which is very noticeable

The reduction I got the last time I tried the build-in shrink in VMWare was much less. I don’t remember the exact percentage…. maybe 25% or so. On the other hand the numbers can’t really be compared since it was a while ago and on a PC with a different VMWare version/setup.

The conclusion that I think we can agree on is that my manual procedure delivers good results - even though I can not rule out there are now easier ways to do this.

By: etung

etung — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 18:08:55 +0000

Sorry for the double post, feel free to delete one of them. I was confused because the first time I rejected the site’s cookie and didn’t see any indication my post had been made.

Your step 3 (defrag, delete unnecessary files) is something Tools Shrink doesn’t do and will help. Can you quantify what you mean by “never got as good a result” - how big a difference are we talking here?

By: mmc

mmc — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 07:43:36 +0000

etung: Thanks for the feedback. My historic experience with the integrated tool shrink processes in VMWare is not as good as this manual process - I never got as good a result with the original (not very documented) functionality as with this recipe. But I guess it is worth trying some more using the latest VMWare versions.

By: etung

etung — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 01:23:17 +0000

Stumbled across this post because someone referenced it on our forums.

mmc: msbob is correct.

It’s true that shrinking wants a zero-filled hard drive, which your manual process accomplishes. However, the Tools shrink process does this for you - this is why you get two successive progress bars. The first, in the guest, is the zeroing pass. The second, on the host, is the space reclamation.

“Discarding” a snapshot is a very unfortunate piece of historical terminology that we’re stuck with. If you go through the Fusion UI, discarding a snapshot does not delete your data. What it removes is the ability to go back to the point in time where the snapshot was taken - your changes get merged back to the base disk (as your manual procedure does, except we can be smarter than a full copy). “Reverting” is what deletes the changes since the snapshot was taken.

This is in contrast with deleting a snapshot from the Finder, which would indeed lose your changes.