Linux – vmdk file too large but guest os is small

redhat-enterprise-linuxvirtual machinevmware-workstationwindows 7

I'm facing a strange issue with my virtual machine. I have an rhel 6.1 guest os running on VMware workstation (9.0.2 build-1031769) hosted on Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit. The size of the vmdk file is around 65 GB whereas the total size of the guest os is only 11GB. What am I missing here ?

[root@praveenVM praveen]# df -h 
Filesystem        Size      Used  Avail  Use%  Mounted on
/dev/sda3         95G        11G   79G    12%   /
tempfs            499M      340K  499M     1%   /dev/shm
/dev/sda1         124M       61M   58M    52%   /boot

There was some temporary files in /var (Unnecessary logs), which I have deleted now and hence the used space is around 11GB. But why is that the vmdk file is around 65GB ? Having deleted all the unnecessary files in the Guest OS, the size of the vmdk should automatically decrease right ?

Best Answer

All I did is re-import the VM into the workstation.

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