http://www.vmware.com/support/ws5/doc/ws_disk_shrink.html
or a command like:
"C:\Program\VMware\VMware Server\vmware-vdiskmanager.exe" -k "XP.vmdk"
Backstory
I noticed my XP VM had ballooned to 200GB on the filesystem. Woah!
[sodo@computer ~]$ ll Virtual\ Machines/XP
total 351188880
drwxr-xr-x. 3 sodo sodo 4096 Jul 25 2011 caches
--rw-rw-rw- 1 sodo sodo 199013260658 Oct 4 13:35 XP.vmdk
The size of single logical C: partition was set to 232GB and it utilized about 1/2 of that in actual files (about 120GB). Wow. Bloated! I had to do something, but quick. Here's what I did:
1) deleted all extraneous files (~45GB)
2) as I'll be migrating to Win7 soon, I deleted all my XP Hotfix uninstall directories. This yielded an inCREDible 5GB of data..just in uninstall files!
3) defragged my XP guest
Resize NTFS and Create a Partition
At this point, there was about 45GB left in actual files. I decided to do two things using gParted
1) resize the NTFS partition down as much as possible with room to spare for other files
2) create a second partition out of the blank space left over. I did this because VMware Tools can't shrink empty partition space. See a deeper technical discussion under "Disk Space" on this page.
1a) The resize from 232GB down to 74GB:
2) Create a new partition
My Shrink!
Once these two steps were completed, I was then able to go back and perform the shrink within the VM guest using VMware Tools, Shrink tab:
The shrink took about two hours, but once completed, I was left with a 47GB VMDK!
[sodo@computer ~]$ ll Virtual\ Machines/XP
total 51222880
drwxr-xr-x. 3 sodo sodo 4096 Jul 25 2011 caches
--rw-rw-rw- 1 sodo sodo 49013260288 Oct 4 13:35 XP.vmdk
Awesome!
TAG
References
