Shrink dynamically allocated VM

[anothersite]

Ok, I am willing to be educated. I have looked through the forum and I did not find what I was looking for.

I have a Windows XP Home Edition VM with 20 GB maximum dynamically increasing VM. 2 GB splits are used. What is the best Windows defragmentation procedure that also minimizes OS X file space, since that is the whole point in my not preallocating the VM hard disk space?

Thanks for you help.

[Linh_My · Accepted solution]

Defraging the VM by its self does not shrink the Virtual disk. In fact the defraging process tends to make the Virtual disk grow slightly. Shrink is a separate process run from VM tools. So the procedure is to first defrag the Virtual disk then run shrink from VMware Tools.

[anothersite]

Thank you.

BTW, for the VMware folks, the final product Fusion Getting Started guide, or some other pdf documentation, should probably actually explain how to "shrink" the VM. The word "shrink" currently only occurs towards the bottom of page 7 in Getting Started and there is no explanation on how to actually shrink the VM in that paragraph.

[admin]

To shrink, open VMware Toolbox (right-click on the VMware tray icon, select Open VMware Tools), and go to the Shrink tab. Note that you can't shrink snapshots.

[Linh_My]

I agree with anothersite, this would be confusing to the target market and should be clearly documented

[Pat_Lee]

I agree with anothersite, this would be confusing to

the target market and should be clearly documented

I will try and get it added to the Online Help, which is the primary documentation for VMware Fusion.

Pat

[Obeechi]

Tray icon... are you talking when Vista or Windows is up and running?

Edit:.. oh I see it now, you are meaning from within Vista...

I think it might be a good idea for (Etung) to add this to his list of defrag steps in his vdiskmanager GUI...

[admin]

Edit:.. oh I see it now, you are meaning from within

Vista...

Right, the way shrink works is that zeros are written to all free space, then the disk is compacted. Doing it in the guest means the tools don't have to know anything about the guest filesystem.

I think it might be a good idea for (Etung) to add

this to his list of defrag steps in his vdiskmanager

GUI...

Shrink and Defrag have different objectives, and I'm not really sure how they affect each other.

[piacentini]

What is the procedure to shrink the disk and reclaim unused space on a Linux guest?

[admin]

Run vmware-toolbox as root, then go to the Shrink tab, select the mounts you want to shrink, and select shrink.

[TheChemist]

sorry to bring up an old topic, but i went to VW tools inside WinXP, selected shrink. the application did its thing, i rebooted and i haven't gained any space in my VW.

I was hoping this would work like Parallels' compressor in how it frees up significant amounts of space within the VW.

am I missing something?

[webfrasse]

Parallels takes care of a lot more than defragmenting and reclaiming existing free space inside the VM.

Their Compressor documentation explains this here: http://www.parallels.com/files/upload/Parallels_Compressor_Workstation_User_Guide.pdf

The complete list includes the following tasks:

Truncate Page file (recreates the system page file of smaller size);

Clean Up Temporary System Files (deletes temporary files used by the system for acceleration of operations);

Clean Up System Cache (deletes temporary data stored by the system to increase performance);

Empty Recycle Bin (permanently removes previously deleted files from the Recycle Bin);

Clean Up Temporary Internet Files (cleans up the Internet Explorer cache, deletes cookies, history, address bar, temporary files);

Disable Hibernate file (disables hibernate file which stores the virtual machine memory when the virtual machine is turned off);

Compact virtual disk(s) (reduces the size of disk in host (primary) operating system);

Clean Up Temporary Setup Files (deletes installation files used by MS Office and other programs);

Clean Up System Media Files (deletes temporary files used by Media Player);

Clean up Drivers Cache (empties the cache for the most popular drivers, clear this check box if you are going to install new hardware);

Clean Up System Restore Information (deletes data related to the last successful system loading).

You can do this yourself in Windows and achieve the same results. I think VMware can do the same (in the sake of Mac user friendliness) and make some of the steps optional since they can't be reversed. I used a tool called XPLite to do some of the windows cleanup. Crap Cleaner from www.ccleaner.com can do some of these tasks as well.

/Mikael