Hi all, I need to understand why my VMs always grow so large they eventually run out of disk space, and then I can't resize them...

[Herojig]

Hi all, I need to understand why my VMs always grow so large they eventually run out of disk space, and then I can't resize them... see the screen shots below:

So all of my VMs are looking like this, and eventually the 5gb goes down to nil, and then things like Dropbox can't update and all sorts of other things start to break. I then go here and try to expand but I get this error on machines with smaller drives:

I suspect that I need at least as much GBs on the system as is the VM, no? So on my MBAs and smaller machines, not possible. But when I move the VM to a larger machine like my iMac, with a large TB drive, I can do the resize. Is that the way it's supposed to work? Perhaps I am not doing this right...

thx for any advice!

[ColoradoMarmot · Accepted solution]

Yep, that's the way it's supposed to work.  Shut it down, move it to the iMac, expand the drive, then shut it down, and move it back.  Make sure you choose 'move' not 'copy' when migrating to avoid triggering windows activation.

In terms of what's eating space inside the VM, you'll have to look to the guest OS for information (that's not a fusion issue).

To free up some space on the host, with the VM shut down, go into settings, click the little tiny refresh circle next to the disk space bar, then if it's says clean up recommended, go into general and do a clean up virtual machine.

[Herojig]

Well, thx for confirming my hunch. So there is no way to say to VMWare "Just keep making it bigger and bigger until the drive is full, I don't care". ha!