Vmware vmdk files growing

Is there a solution at all? Improve this question. Hennes Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. The usual procedure for reducing the size of a. This can be done using vmware-vdiskmanager with the -t parameter whose values are: 0 : single growable virtual disk 1 : growable virtual disk split in 2Gb files 2 : single preallocated virtual disk 3 : preallocated virtual disk split in 2Gb files The following command will convert the.

Improve this answer. DanielB: No, it doesn't reduce the maximal size, just the physical size. Reducing the maximal size can be dangerous, as some OS cannot boot without some free space on the system disk. However, this does not completely solve my problem, as if I want to keep the VMDK always under, let's say 30GB, I will have to periodically repeat the operation which takes a long time indeed.

If the disk can always be slimmed down to the wanted size, meaning that the procedure above always works to reduce the size, then you could limit the size in the future by converting the disk to fixed-size. Show 5 more comments. Recommended option is A. Excellll So the steps to shrink the disk are: Resize the partition on disk via the OS, or via a suitable live CD Resize the vmdk device, carefully choosing the boundary not to cut any usable partition space.

You can always leave some more space in the imnage than it is actually needed. Two examples: From the guest OS: windows 7 You can use the online resizing capability.

It's a good idea to first defragment the disk from within the quest OS. Run diskmgmt. In the dialog that appears reduce the size as per your requirements. Note that since the partition is in use if it is the system disk, or heavily fragmented you might not be able to recover most of your free space.

Provision to leave extra free space. Now we want to know the partitions ending disk sector or byte. To be sure that we do not need to add anything missing, we can use the diskpart cmd line utility to find the partition's offset from the start of the device. When reaching command prompt type: startx, this will hopefully bring you to graphical interface. Once on the systemresque's desktop, start gparted e. Find the partition to be resized this must be cleanly unmounted, if in doubt do a scandisk from the guest operating system.

Do the resize, carefully planning your space needs. Again we need to find the ending offset in sectors or bytes of the partition. Open terminal and write parted [ device ], then unit s, print. Why not simply set the size of the disk involved to 30GB from GB. I did not personally create the VM, this is why. How do I shrink the disk itself? I have the partitions within the disk shrink down but vdiskmanager.

The problem which is not documented clearly, is how to resize a vmdk device After resizing the partition of course. Also mdpc i think your answer is not constructive. In my case it was due to the machines having snapshots this was on a machine running Hyper-V and we couldn't remove snapshots because there was not enough disk space.

We actually converted the machines using the vmware converter, moved the machines to another machine running esxi with an 8MB block size, verified the machines booted properly, installed esxi on the old machine with the 8MB block size, then moved the VMs back.

The maximum file size for a virtual disk depends on this block size. For the limits of the different block sizes see e. In your case, to create more than GB virtual disk you need to select a block size of at least 4 MB. The block size cannot be changed, so you will have to delete and re-create the datastore. Caution: This will destroy all data on this datastore!!

Consolidating the snapshots won't necessarily delete those files if the are from manual snapshots. You would have to go to the manage snapshots and then delete the manual snapshots that are not in use.

Brand Representative for VMware. That said, trying to go through the Snapshot manager and deleting all snapshots that way will insure that you are sitting on a 'clean' vm.

If the files are still there and when you open your Snapshot Manager there are not snapshots, then you should be good to go with deleting these old snapshots. No you can not! Problem is when you create snapshot it creates delta files wich are used as "incremental files" to separate files before and after snapshot. VM host then makes VM see these files as one disk.

If you delete one from the chain you will corrupt the data! Joined: Oct 26, Posts: VM's take a lot of space. I keep only one on my laptop with limited snapshots, and I have the "Default location for virtual machines" on a data partition so that they won't slow up and increase the size of backups I make of the system partition. I have other, bigger VM's on a 1. I think running them through a USB 2. I hope with USB 3.

I had few snapshoots, and the strange thing is when i delete last snapshoot from ''snapshoot manager'' almost all size of that snapshoot is adding to the previous snapshoot I removed VMWare, my hard drive it's not big enough