VM Workstation Pro

Hello, first time post so go easy on me. running vmware workstation Pro 17. with a windows 11 host. I'm unable to "clean up disks" it identifies that about 1tb of space can be reclaimed, says it completes but doesn't actually do anything. I've done all the basic stuff such as defrag etc. i'm tired of creating new VM's and imaging them from one to the next. does this have something to do with TPM and encryption? or what are your thoughts on how to get these vmk to shrink?

bobbybob said:

what are your thoughts on how to get these vmk to shrink?

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Welcome to Eleven Forum.

See if this helps....

Workstation virtual machines can be pre-allocated or sparse.

• In a pre-allocated virtual machine, the size of the virtual disk file .... is equal to the size of the virtual machine.
• In a sparse virtual machine, the size of the virtual disk file (or files) is equal to the total used space of the virtual machine.

.... if the size of your virtual disks is significantly larger than the used space shown in the virtual machine's operating system, it is possible to reduce this size.

Click to expand...

bobbybob said:

Hello, first time post so go easy on me. running vmware workstation Pro 17. with a windows 11 host. I'm unable to "clean up disks" it identifies that about 1tb of space can be reclaimed, says it completes but doesn't actually do anything. I've done all the basic stuff such as defrag etc. i'm tired of creating new VM's and imaging them from one to the next. does this have something to do with TPM and encryption? or what are your thoughts on how to get these vmk to shrink?

Click to expand...

I am not sure about vmk files but vhdx files exhibit similar issues.

Suppose you have used 50 GB space on an 80GB drive, and then you delete 5GB of stuff in vhdx file, you would expect to see the vhdx file as only be using 45GB but it still shows externally as 50 GB.

Basically the 5GB recovered is not really deleted but it can be re-used i.e.inside the vm it shows as only 45GB being used.

In the end, when running the vm, you still have 35 GB to use allthough externally you get the illusion you only have 30GB to use.

There are ways to sort this out. Easiest way is to clone vhdx to a second vhdx.

I see @Brink has suggested a solution but I never found the vhdx compact method ever recovers much.

The only other thing that would be stopping you is if you have snapshots, remove all snapshots and then you can compact the VM disk size, as long as you don't have the space pre allocated. If you have snapshots, remove them, compact, then take a snapshot.

hello ty for the responses. there are no snapshots (I double checked) also when I have a windows 10 host I don't have this issue at all. but I also don't add tpm or encrypt the machine the way windows 11 requires? i know i'm hung up on that right now. Back to my windows 11 machine. I've also added a second virtual hdd to a secondary physical drive, I have the same issue I moved about 500gig to it, deleted it, removed from recycling bin, ran disk clean up (within windows) within the host it showed 0 file 0 folders. it was empty. workstation pro shows 500+gig in use said it could reclaim the 500+ it ran for a short moment said done but never reduced the size.

bobbybob said:

hello ty for the responses. there are no snapshots (I double checked) also when I have a windows 10 host I don't have this issue at all. but I also don't add tpm or encrypt the machine the way windows 11 requires? i know i'm hung up on that right now. Back to my windows 11 machine. I've also added a second virtual hdd to a secondary physical drive, I have the same issue I moved about 500gig to it, deleted it, removed from recycling bin, ran disk clean up (within windows) within the host it showed 0 file 0 folders. it was empty. workstation pro shows 500+gig in use said it could reclaim the 500+ it ran for a short moment said done but never reduced the size.

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I think there is some confusion with the allocated virtual space vs. actual space.

On the screenshot below, I have 4 VMs, 2 Linux/2 Win11 ,each allocated 100 GB, yet the drive size I: is only 152 GB.
If that space was truly allocated, it would be 400 GB.

OAT said:

I think there is some confusion with the allocated virtual space vs. actual space.

On the screenshot below, I have 4 VMs, 2 Linux/2 Win11 ,each allocated 100 GB, yet the drive size I: is only 152 GB.
If that space was truly allocated, it would be 400 GB.

View attachment 106369

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Hello, I appreciate your thoughts but I'm not confused on allocated vs actual space. the 500g I referenced before was on a virtual disk that was not preallocated, and was a 2TB drive. I'm currently copying some data over to provide screen shots.

bobbybob said:

Hello, I appreciate your thoughts but I'm not confused on allocated vs actual space. the 500g I referenced before was on a virtual disk that was not preallocated, and was a 2TB drive. I'm currently copying some data over to provide screen shots.

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In order to reduce allocated size you need to reduce the size within the VM, exit the VM & reclaim the actual space through the Pro interface.
That is the only way you can reclaim that space.



As a result, within one of the VMs, Dev in this case, it looks like this:

OAT said:

In order to reduce allocated size you need to reduce the size within the VM, exit the VM & reclaim the actual space through the Pro interface.
That is the only way you can reclaim that space.

View attachment 106374

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is this a windows 11 specific issue? never done that with any other OS to reduce actual size on disk.

what causes this is I move an enormous amount of data on off virtual disks on a windows machine. the virtual disk size grows even though i'm removing\deleting data from within the host. this is normal behavior of a windows vm. so it's not uncommon for me on a weekly basis shut down the vm host "clean up disks" to reduce the size of the file so my hardware host doesn't run out of space. I've done this for years with windows XP, windows 7, and windows 10 hosts with no issue. only when I started using windows 11 hosts do I run into this issue?

bobbybob said:

is this a windows 11 specific issue? never done that with any other OS to reduce actual size on disk.

what causes this is I move an enormous amount of data on off virtual disks on a windows machine. the virtual disk size grows even though i'm removing\deleting data from within the host. this is normal behavior of a windows vm. so it's not uncommon for me on a weekly basis shut down the vm host "clean up disks" to reduce the size of the file so my hardware host doesn't run out of space. I've done this for years with windows XP, windows 7, and windows 10 hosts with no issue. only when I started using windows 11 hosts do I run into this issue?

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I do not know why you have that issue.
I do not get what you mean by 'removing data'?
Do you mean truncating the volume? Compacting the volume? Within the VM? or from the host?
Please clarify.

As you can see I can run 4 VMs, one at a time, within a small partition of 150 GB with room to spare.
A backup of those 4 VMs takes less than 1 minute.
You might have to reassess your setup and modify it accordingly.
And no, nothing has changed in Win11.

wow just had an interesting test result. I'm normally trying to clean up disks to reclaim 300-800gig. for the sake of speed I stopped my transfer at about 20gig and tried to clean up disks and it worked! i didn't do anything different. my issue seems to be tied to the amount of space i'm trying to reclaim. i'm setting up more tests to see where the breaking point is. any one with experience on this?

i wonder if on the backend it kicks off a process to "shrink" the dynamically expanding file and immediately returns control appearing that it's complete, but in actuality it's continuing to work it's way through the file in the background and just due to the size of the files in your case, it takes a fair amount of time.

just spitballing.

pparks1 said:

i wonder if on the backend it kicks off a process to "shrink" the dynamically expanding file and immediately returns control appearing that it's complete, but in actuality it's continuing to work it's way through the file in the background and just due to the size of the files in your case, it takes a fair amount of time.

just spitballing.

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Good thought! it's possible.... I've got 3 new VM's spun up and they are copying data, it will take a while for me to finish the test due to the size of the data and only having a 1g interface to move it on. I'll update the thread with my results later tonight.

ok believe I can verify that it's not running in the background. it just doesn't run. I cannot reproduce this issue when the total reclaim amount is 200G or less. I skipped 300g and 400g, and found at 500g I can consistently reproduce this failure. my hardware host only had 128gig left on a 1tb drive. I had a thought that maybe it has to do with how much free space or lack there of may contribute to this problem? For my last test I'm moving the entire vm host to a bigger harddrive for a retest. i'm hoping this will prove that it doesn't have to get bigger before smaller kind of thing. It's late I'll do my last test tomorrow and report the results.

bobbybob said:

ok believe I can verify that it's not running in the background. it just doesn't run. I cannot reproduce this issue when the total reclaim amount is 200G or less. I skipped 300g and 400g, and found at 500g I can consistently reproduce this failure. my hardware host only had 128gig left on a 1tb drive. I had a thought that maybe it has to do with how much free space or lack there of may contribute to this problem? For my last test I'm moving the entire vm host to a bigger harddrive for a retest. i'm hoping this will prove that it doesn't have to get bigger before smaller kind of thing. It's late I'll do my last test tomorrow and report the results.

Click to expand...

well that didn't work. when there is a large amount 500g+ of disk space to be reclaimed this process just fails. maybe a software "feature"? I'll have to clean up disk's much earlier in their life to get around this. Ty everyone for your time and help.

bobbybob said:

well that didn't work. when there is a large amount 500g+ of disk space to be reclaimed this process just fails. maybe a software "feature"? I'll have to clean up disk's much earlier in their life to get around this. Ty everyone for your time and help.

Click to expand...

@bobbybob

One way of doing it is to image the VM via Macrium / other type of backup software, delete the VM disk, re-allocate a new one of the size / type you want and then restore the backed up image to the new VM disk.

Use a stand alone bootable restore program to restore -- e.g an iso image and boot that IN THE VM.

This method Works for "all known" VM's !!!! -- also a good way to copy say a VMWare VM to Hyper-V or even KVM/QEMU.

If re-sizing VmWare using this method VM's don't delete the VM itself and the config file - just re-assign the virtual disk(s).

The Vm program should be able to add missing drivers when changing say from VmWare to Hyper-V / Virtual box or from a Linux KVM/QEMU to any vityualplatform on Windows -- or even if you want to create a physical Windows system from the VM (V2P conversion). -- Windows is pretty OK booting up a basic image on all sorts of different hardware- just update later. Note though in changing VM platfoerms you *Might* have to re-activate Windows again -- not always though -- depends on the amount of "common paravirtualisation of hardware" exists between the different VM platforms.

The last version of Macrium Free (the old Freebie) still works for this type of stuff BTW - just create the stand alone bootable iso.

In the unlikely event of the VM failing to boot just re-create the bootloader via bcdboot.exe -- the stand alone Macriun restore iso has a PE command line which works, or use any Windows install media and choose -->repair computer and get into command propmpt which is also a Winpe system - from which you can run bcdboot.exe.

Cheers
jimbo