Link to home
Start Free TrialLog in
Avatar of AlphaLolz
AlphaLolzFlag for United States of America

asked on

Trying to shrink a VMWare client from a virtualized computer image

I use VMWare Workstation on my personal laptop to host a variety of Windows and Linux installs.  This includes hosting a Windows image of my customer's Windows workstations, which allows me to VPN into the company for various purposes.

In the past I've used a company ISO to build a VM, however recently the company has rolled out new workstations and with this they won't give me a new ISO.  I was able to pretty easily virtualize it though with the VMWare utility and have an image now that runs fine.

The problem is that the original image is on a 256 GB drive and now I have this 256 GB image as a VMWare guest.  Only about 25 GB of the disk on the laptop was in use though so there's a lot of wasted space.  I'd like to be able to somehow shrink down this guest image, but I can't find any way to do so.  I'm throwing away at least 150 GB of my person laptop's disk though because of this.

Can anyone describe any way to reduce this client size?  I've looked at shrinking the partition size of the image, but that doesn't seem to give me any way of shrinking the image overall.  Is the only way to possibly do this to go back to the original workstation they gave me and shrink that partition and then virtualize it again (or will the virtualization always use the size of the host drive regardless)?
Avatar of John
John
Flag of Canada image

Someone made the image to use all allocated space. Workstation allows you to use up to a limit which is better.

Use VMware Converter to take the machine as input and write it out to a (much) smaller machine.

I have used Converter to make machines bigger, so it should work fine
Avatar of AlphaLolz

ASKER

I'm not following.

No one gave me an image.  That's the point.  I'm the one virtualizing the laptop.  I'm creating it and there are no options to create the image based on space consumed vs. the entirety of the space available in the partition.
You can still use VMware Converter to take in the machine and write out a smaller machine.

It appears the original virtualization assumed data spanned the entire disk.

You can also open the machine in VMware Workstation and use the VM, Manage Menu to see if it allows you to clean up empty space. If the operation is allowed, that may possibly shrink it. I am not certain if all the space was allocated.

Converter should allow you to write out a smaller disk
ASKER CERTIFIED SOLUTION
Avatar of John
John
Flag of Canada image

Link to home
membership
This solution is only available to members.
To access this solution, you must be a member of Experts Exchange.
Start Free Trial
Well unfortunately it seems that a security update has happened and i'm no longer able to virtualize this laptop.  I'm going to consider myself lucky, but I won't be able to attempt the suggestions.  I'm sure they would have helped though.
Well unfortunately it seems that a security update has happened and i'm no longer able to virtualize this laptop.  I'm going to consider myself lucky, but I won't be able to attempt the suggestions.  I'm sure they would have helped though.
Interesting.   Thank you for the update and I am always happy to help you.