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Shrinking a Virtual Disk
You can physically reclaim space in virtual disks using the shrink feature
provided in VMware Tools. For example, if you have removed files from your
virtual disk and want to reduce the amount of storage space that the virtual
disk consumes on your host operating system, you can remove the excess space from
the virtual disk using the Shrink feature.
Running Shrink performs these actions:
- Removes unused disk blocks from your virtual hard disk and reduces (shrinks)
the amount of storage space consumed by the virtual disk on your host operating
system. Your virtual disk can still grow up to the maximum size for which it
was originally created.
- Reorganizes your virtual disk so that its data blocks are contiguous. This
provides better performance when the virtual machine accesses the disk.
- Converts older-format virtual disks to the new VMware Workstation
3.1 format (if you run Shrink on a virtual
disk from a previous VMware Workstation release). You see this prompt only if you
shrink a virtual disk created under a prior version of VMware Workstation and are
running the virtual disk under a new version of VMware Workstation. If you choose
to convert (upgrade) your virtual disk, you can no longer use that virtual disk
with older versions of VMware Workstation.
Note: To upgrade a virtual hard disk to VMware Workstation 3.1,
be sure to select Settings > Upgrade Disk. Running this command does not change
the way the disk is stored; rather, it changes the version of VMware Workstation that
runs on the virtual hard disk. For example, this command affects the virtual hardware
that VMware Workstation uses (such as the virtual hardware that supports USB).
The virtual disks to be shrunk must be booted in persistent mode. (The mode
of a virtual disk may be modified before the virtual machine is powered on by
choosing Settings > Configuration Editor, selecting the virtual disk, then
choosing Persistent as the disk
mode.) This operation requires free disk space equal to the size of the
virtual disk being shrunk.
To shrink a virtual disk on a Windows guest operating system:
- Double-click the VMware Tools icon (generally in the system tray at the end
of the taskbar).
- Click the Shrink tab.
- Select the disk you want to shrink and click Prepare to Shrink.
- Follow the on-screen instructions.
To shrink a virtual disk on a Linux guest operating system:
- Open VMware Tools. If it is not available, launch it by running vmware-toolbox.
- Click the Shrink tab.
- Select the mount point for the disk you want to shrink and click Prepare to
Shrink.
- Follow the on-screen instructions.
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