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How do I clean my VM disk space?

Author

Christopher Duran

Updated on March 16, 2026

How do I clean my VM disk space?

Procedure
  1. Select Window > Virtual Machine Library.
  2. Select a virtual machine in the Virtual Machine Library window and click Settings.
  3. Under System Settings in the Settings window, click General.
  4. Select a cleanup option. Manual. Click Clean Up Virtual Machine.

People also ask, how do I clean up a VMDK file?

Select the virtual machine in the library. From the menu bar, select VM > Manage > Clean Up Disks. Workstation calculates how much space can be reclaimed, and either the Clean Up Now button becomes available or a message appears, explaining why the command is unavailable. Click Clean Up Now to start the process.

Likewise, can I delete VMware virtual disk file? You should not delete these files as you will break your virtual machine. The reason you have so many vmdk files is because they are being split up into 2GB files. Yo do this by going to the settings of the VM, clicking General, then Clean Up Virtual Machine.

Similarly, it is asked, how do I reclaim disk space in VMware?

Select the virtual machine you want to compact in the main window and click VM > Manage > Clean Up Disks. The tool will analyze the selected virtual machine's disk and show you how much space you can reclaim. To reclaim the space, click “Clean up now”.

How do I compress a VM?

Go to VM > Manage > Clean up Disks.Click the Shrink tab. Select the drive you want to shrink. Click Prepare to Shrink, then follow the onscreen instructions.

How much space does a VMware snapshot take up?

If you plan on using VMware snapshots, you should create VMs with a virtual disk size that's smaller than the maximum VMDK size by the amount of the maximum overhead -- e.g., 512 GB - 4GB = 508 GB. Snapshot files are small initially -- 16 MB -- but they grow as the system makes writes to the VM's disk files.

Can we reduce disk size in VMware?

Unfortunately it's not possible to decrease the disk size easily. In order to do this you need to use the free Converter and do a volume based conversion, which allows you to define the target virtual disk size.

How do I check disk space in VMware?

In the /var/log/vmware/esxupdate.

Checking disk space usage on the ESX/ESXi service console partitions

  1. Open a console to the ESX/ESXi host.
  2. Type df -h .
  3. Review the Use% for each of the listed items.
  4. When you have finished reviewing the output, type logout and press Enter to exit the system.

How do I compact a virtual disk in VMware?

To compact a virtual hard disk for a selected virtual machine, select VM > Settings, click the Hardware tab, select the virtual hard disk, and select Compact from the Utilities menu.

How do I change hard drive size in VMware?

Under Workstation 7, you can adjust the size of the virtual hard disk from the graphical interface:
  1. Select the corresponding virtual machine in the list.
  2. Click on Edit virtual machine settings.
  3. Select the Hard Disk menu item.
  4. Click on Utilities > Expand.
  5. Enter the new size and press Expand.

How do I reduce the size of a Parallels virtual machine?

Parallels virtual machines will be listed separately: Look through the files in Documents section (it includes Downloads folder as well) and delete large files that you no longer need, make sure to empty the Trash. If you want to reduce size of your virtual machine(s), click on Parallels VMs > Free Up Disk Space.

What is SDelete?

SDelete is a free command line utility by Microsoft's Sysinternals team that you may use to delete files and free disk space securely.

What is provisioned space in VMware?

Provisioned space is something that comes into play when you thin provision your virtual machines. Basically you start out using no space, and then as a virtual machine starts to use space, VMware will start to grow that virtual machine on the datastore as needed.

How do I shrink a thin provisioned disk in VMware?

5.Re: How can I shrink a thin provisioned vmdk file?
  1. migrate the VM to another datstore, selecting "Thick Provisioned" as the target format.
  2. run sdelete within the guest OS to zero out unused blocks.
  3. migrate the VM back to the original datastore, selecting "Thin Provisioned" in the wizard.

How do I empty the Recycle Bin in VMware?

Open VMware on your machine -> navigate to the list of installed virtual machines. Right-click the virtual machine you want to remove -> select Delete from disk. Confirm that you want to delete it by pressing the Yes button inside the prompt. To also free up disk space, you will need to empty the Recycle Bin as well.

How do I shrink a VMware fusion disk?

Shrinking the virtual disk
  1. Open the VMware Tools Control Panel / Toolbox: In Windows: Double click the VMware Tools icon in the system tray, or go to Start > Control Panel > VMware Tools.
  2. Click the Shrink tab.
  3. Ensure that your boot drive is selected.
  4. Click Prepare to Shrink and then follow the prompts.

What are VMDK files?

VMDK file is the virtual disk image file created by VMWare software. It stores all contents of a virtual disk. A Vmware virtual hard disk can be made up one or multiple VMDK files. To open VMDK file, please follow the steps, Run PowerISO.

What is the use of VMDK file?

The VMDK file extension refers to "Virtual Machine Disk". It's an open file format provided by VMware, mostly used for services for cloud computing and virtualization. Basically, vmdk files are virtual disk files containing all the info of a virtual machine.

Can I delete VMEM files?

Well, after looking briefly on the web, I found your answer, the VMEM file, are file created when your VM is running, or if it crashed. Try backing up your vm and delete those file, then run you vm. But normally, you can delete those file (that's what I do on my R&D VM farm).

Can I delete VMware?

To delete a virtual machine from the host computer, right-click the name of the virtual machine in the Favorites list and select Delete from Disk; or, select the virtual machine and choose VM > Delete from disk. VMware Workstation allows you to delete a virtual machine even if it is a member of a team.

Can I delete CTK VMDK file?

Delete any -CTK. VMDK files within the virtual machine's working directory. In the vSphere Web Client, right-click the virtual machine and click Power On. If you are using a backup application which utilizes CBT, you must re-enable CBT manually.

How do I delete a locked VMDK file?

vmx file is locked on all hosts except the one on which it is running. After you have located the virtual machine which has mounted the . vmdk, remove it. Select that virtual machine and go to Edit Settings > Hard Disk > Remove.

How do I delete a VMware log file?

To get a count on the number of vmware-x.log files in the folder, run:
  1. # ls *.log | wc -l. To remove the logs, run:
  2. # rm -f vmware-*.log. This deletes all log files, unless there are too many arguments.
  3. # rm -f vmware-1*.log.

How do I delete a VMware workstation 15 virtual machine?

Deleting a virtual machine from VMware Workstation (2075483)
  1. Click the name of the virtual machine.
  2. In the Workstation menu bar, click Manage in.
  3. Select Delete from disk.
  4. Click Yes.
  5. To free up the space in VMware Workstation, empty the Recycle Bin.

Can you compress a VMDK?

vmdk file after the defragmentation, you will notice that its size hasn't changed, but if you compress the VM (e.g. . zip or . tar. gz), the compressed file will be much smaller than before the defragmentation.

What is Zerofree?

zerofree finds the unallocated, blocks with non-zero value content in an ext2, ext3 or ext4 filesystem (e.g. /dev/hda1) and fills them with zeroes (or another octet of your choice). Filling unused areas with zeroes is useful if the device on which this file-system resides is a disk image.

What is a virtual hard disk VirtualBox?

Oracle VM VirtualBox can use large image files on a real hard disk and present them to a guest as a virtual hard disk. This is the most common method, described in Section 5.2, “Disk Image Files (VDI, VMDK, VHD, HDD)”. iSCSI storage servers can be attached to Oracle VM VirtualBox.

How do I check disk space in VirtualBox?

To check whether a disk is dynamic or fixed size in VirtualBox, right-click the virtual machine that uses the disk and select “Settings”. Click the “Storage” tab and select the disk. You'll see what type of disk it is displayed next to “Details”.

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