Mac – How to shrink the VMware image

dynamic-diskvirtual machinevmware

I created an image of a Windows Server 2008 system using the free VMware Player and set the maximum hard drive size to 100GB. I then gave those image files – 30GB at the time – to a server hosting company. A few weeks later I asked them for a copy of them back; the image should not have changed much in size, but the files I got back were the full 100GB size.

I am not a VMware expert at all, so I have two questions:

How/why did they expand the whole dynamic disk?
Is there any way I can somehow shrink this image down to the size that actually contains data?

I tried the VMware converter, and it can't seem to read my image (vmdk) file; it just outputs a generic error.

Best Answer

My speculation is that when they created the VM from your image they pre-allocated the full size of the images (this can have better performance). When they exported them you got the full image.

I doubt you can shrink the images with VMware player. VMware Workstation comes with vmware-vdiskmanager that can apparently convert from a fixed size disk to a growable disk reducing the size of the image. I have never tried this so I cannot say how well it works.

The manual is here: http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vddk/vddk12_diskmanager.pdf

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Mac – VMware Workstation: how to reduce .vmdk maximum size

The usual procedure for reducing the size of a .vmdk disk is to:

Defragment the disk via the guest, choosing a defragmentation mode that consolidates empty space at the end of the disk. For a Windows guest, you should empty the Recycle Bin and turn off hibernation and paging, returning them after the defragmentation is done.
Zero all unused space on the disk.
For Windows use sdelete : sdelete -c.
For Linux : dd if=/dev/zero of=/mytempfile && rm -f /mytempfile.
Shrink the disk (which may take quite a long time to complete).
VMware Workstation : Menu VM / Manage / Clean up disks.
Or use : vmware-vdiskmanager.exe -k [VMDK PATH].
for ESX : vmkfstools --punchzero [VMDK PATH].

Converting the disk from growable to preallocated could stop its growing. This can be done using vmware-vdiskmanager with the -t parameter whose values are:

0 : single growable virtual disk
1 : growable virtual disk split in 2Gb files
2 : single preallocated virtual disk
3 : preallocated virtual disk split in 2Gb files

The following command will convert the .vmdk from growable to preallocated :

vmware-vdiskmanager -r current_disk_name.vmdk -t 3 new_disk_name.vmdk

If you wish to change the size of the disk, this should be done while the disk is still in growable format (examples here).

For more information see the Virtual Disk Manager User’s Guide.

Best Answer

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Mac – VMware Workstation: how to reduce .vmdk maximum size

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