如何缩减VMware虚拟机的磁盘空间

In my laptop, I have two virtual machines, and their VM disks take about 80GB-100GB hard disk. But if you mount the VM disks, you will find that half of the space is pre-occupied, but not used. Luckily, VMware provides some ways of shrinking the VM disks. I’ll take my Windows XP VM as an example to tell how to reduce the hard disk space of VM.

1. Find the Virtual Machines folder. Normally, it locates ‘C:\Users\<your NT ID>\Documents\Virtual Machines\<specified VM>’ and in this case, it’s ‘C:\Users\wuj28\Documents\Virtual Machines\WinXP’. You can find there is one file, whose extension is vmdk, and size is about 25GB. This is the target we’re going to shoot today. If you have a good memory, the value of 25BG is set by the VM creator, and its value can be viewed in the VM settings.

2. Defrag the VM disk.
a. Run the CMD as the administrator, and go to the VM folder.
b. Run the vmware-vdiskmanager to defrag the VM disk.

c. Repair the VM disk file after the defragment.

d. Shrink the VM disk and repair again.

Now we have a very solid VM disk file.
3. Create the new VM disk file by converting the original one.


You can find the new VM disk file is a lot less than the original one. Now you can move the original VM disk file to another folder, and rename the new VM disk file as the original one. Then power on your VM. If there is no problem, you can shift-delete the old & fat VM disk file now, and the disk space comes back


TIP: These operations need you have enough disk space, so if you have snapshots for VMs, you can deleted them all. It will free some GBs space, depends on how many snapshots you have.