VMWare VM size out of control

I have a thinly provisioned Windows 7 VM with an 80GB virtual HDD. I then added a thinly provisioned 100GB virtual drive. The size of the VM then swelled to over 200GB, so I deleted the 100GB virtual drive, uninstalled any unnecessary apps, did a disk cleanup, removed all snapshots, and the size of the VM is still well over 200GB (it still keeps growing on its own). From inside the VM, only around 40GB of space is being taken up, so what is using the rest of that space and how can I make it smaller?

I'm using VMWare Workstation 9.

When you set up the VM, did you clicked fixed size or dynamic for the hard drives?

cullam3n said:

When you set up the VM, did you clicked fixed size or dynamic for the hard drives?

Click to expand...

Dynamic.

SMOKEU said:

Dynamic.

Click to expand...

Well that's it then. When you set it to dynamic, VMware will allocate space as it needed. Set it to fixed 100GB and that will do what you want.

cullam3n said:

Well that's it then. When you set it to dynamic, VMware will allocate space as it needed. Set it to fixed 100GB and that will do what you want.

Click to expand...

But what is actually using all that space? The used space that the VM OS says is not even 1/4 of the used disk space.

It might be using the HDD progressively as swap space.

I don't believe dynamic disks can ever shrink, even if you delete everything in them. I'd have to check at work as I use virtualbox at home, but I almost always use fixed disk anyway. Makes it much easier to manage VMs since you know how much space they will take up, and because you cannot revert to a snapshot with dynamic disks, quiesced snapshots are not used when backing up dynamic disks.

So I might have to delete the VM and start again with a fixed disk. Thanks guys.