windows 7 - vmdk file too large but guest os is small

06
2014-04
  • pravinkenator

    I'm facing a strange issue with my virtual machine. I have an rhel 6.1 guest os running on VMware workstation (9.0.2 build-1031769) hosted on Windows 7 Enterprise 64 bit. The size of the vmdk file is around 65 GB whereas the total size of the guest os is only 11GB. What am I missing here ?

    [root@praveenVM praveen]# df -h 
Filesystem        Size      Used  Avail  Use%  Mounted on
/dev/sda3         95G        11G   79G    12%   /
tempfs            499M      340K  499M     1%   /dev/shm
/dev/sda1         124M       61M   58M    52%   /boot

    There was some temporary files in /var (Unnecessary logs), which I have deleted now and hence the used space is around 11GB. But why is that the vmdk file is around 65GB ? Having deleted all the unnecessary files in the Guest OS, the size of the vmdk should automatically decrease right ?

    • Answers
  • pravinkenator

    Gotcha,

    It was extremely simple. I just had to reimport the vm into the workstation.

    Thanks all !


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    When I rename a virtual machine in vmware workstation, the old file names (e.g.: the hard drive file name) remains.

    How do I manually rename these without messing up the virtual machine?

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    • Related Answers
  • shf301

    The vmx file that stores the virtual machine's configuration is a just a text file. You can just rename all of the vm's files and then edit the vmx to point to those files.

  • xyutech

    If you are running vmware workstation 8, you can use the cloning function (VM-> Manage -> Clone), you can then give a new name to the cloned VM.

  • Rob Goodwin

    I use the import option to do this. This way I can keep a base VM on a share someplace called base-XP or whatever, then when I need a new test VM, I do an import and the disks are named according to the setting I specify when going through the import wizard.