VMWare file size too large

You created a snapshot maybe ?

see my EE Article

HOW TO: VMware Snapshots :- Be Patient

Do you still have the VM, we can check ?

No, this was prior to any snapshots. When I tried to compact, it got stuck as well.

Would snapshots cause it to blow up like that? could a snapshot cause it to balloon even bigger than the contents themselves?

Yes, if you had created a snapshot, it would grow, and grow, and grow, and grow to the size of your host disk and more!

I see. thank you. I'm sure this isn't snapshot related, as the other VM's have snapshots also, and are well below 35GB.

Any kind of operation that's disk-related seems to get stuck. I may be dealing with a corruption issue of some sort...

It depends on how active the VM is, snapshots can grow 1GB an hour!

So from reading a couple of your articles, it seems you aren't a big fan of snapshots.

What do you do to backup guests? Do you install a backup program on every one of them?

Thank you so much. I loved the concept of Snapshots and was using them liberally. I will stop.

I will just start doing a straight COPY of the contents of the VM, as per your suggestion.

The best method, I find, with VMware Workstation, is to use the CLONE option, so before you make any changes or backup, create a CLONE of the VM.

Should you find an issue with the current VM, after updates for example, just delete the current VM, rename the CLONE, and startup again!

Good stuff - thanks.

What are your thoughts about storing VM's on a NAS box? The Hypervisor would still be a PC, but the files would be stored on a NAS box.

Technically new question, fine, but be careful of performance, network access is slower than local disk, PC and NAS configuration can also add to latency!

Ok - thank again.