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WMWare eating up all my HD space

Hi,

I'm using the VMware Server 1.x free version on Windows 2003 and I have 1 VM configured, I'm having HD space problems and I'D like to know what's going on.

I have a VM that has 2 drives configured to 100Gig (so total is at 200Gig), in my host folder I currently have 290+Gig taken up by all the files. My VM does not has any snapshot running.

I have the following info on my drives in my machine.vmx:

scsi0:0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0:0.fileName = "Webber-000003.vmdk"
ide0:0.present = "TRUE"
ide0:0.autodetect = "TRUE"
ide0:0.filename = "auto detect"
ide0:0.deviceType = "atapi-cdrom"
scsi0.present = "TRUE"
scsi0.virtualDev = "buslogic"
scsi0:1.present = "TRUE"
scsi0:1.fileName = "Webber Backup HD-000003.vmdk"
scsi0:1.redo = ""
scsi0:1.mode = "independent-persistent"

And I have the following files in my VM Folder:

somerandomgui.vmem (1Gig)
webber-000001.vmdk (24Gig)
webber-000002.vmdk (35Gig)
webber-000003.vmdk (23Gig)
webber Backup HD-000001.vmdk (8Gig)
webber Backup HD-000002.vmdk (1Gig)
webber Backup HD-000003.vmdk (1.5Gig)
webber Backup HD.vmdk (105Gig)
webber-flat.vmdk (105Gig)

I've tried moving all the files but the 2 that appear in my .vmx flie and I get the following error:
Faild to retrieve disk information for "c:\Virtual Machines\Webber\Webber-000003.vmdk". The parent of this disk could not be opened.

How do I go about unlinking the files or making them into one big 105Gig file again (1 for each drive) . Because as it is I'm running fast out of disk space.

Thanks

ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION

Paul Solovyovsky

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SOLUTION

Mysidia

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groupedsi

ASKER

@paulsolov I might look into this as a last resort because this computer is Active Directory enabled and last time I converted the machine I had to take it out of the domain and bring it back in to generate a new uniqueID.

@Mysidia you might be on to something because I can't even hit Take Snapshot when the machine is powered on (but I know that I could do this since when I do WindowsUpdate I usually take a snapshot just in case). The whole menu is grayed out.
I'll power down tonight and try the snapshot way.
If no success with the snapshot I'll go the rebuild way. I just hope I don't require too much HD space as with the ~100Gig overhead I currently have, I don't have too much space left.

This server is used extensively during daytime, so I can only things at night.
I'll get back and post some results late tonight or very early tomorrow morning.

thanks to both of you for the suggestions.

Paul Solovyovsky

If you're converting a virtual machine to virtual machine it keeps the SID which alleviates the need to disjoin and rejoin domain. I've had issues with snapshots on the virtual machines and could not commit them. After contacting vmware tech support this was the recommended solution

groupedsi

ASKER

Thanks for the follow up. Good to know about this.

groupedsi

ASKER

I'll split the points as both solutions are solid ones. I started with the "take snapshot remove snapshot" but since VMWare server 1.x doesn't have a progress bar of any kind and the vmware server is brought down to a halt, I opted for the converting machine way.

Thanks to both of you.