Its always bugged me how large and bloated my Virtual Machines become. I recently installed XP Pro and ran Windows Update to get it up to scratch, and the raw install Virtual Machine file was a little over 3Gb. I installed a few of my favorite video editing/converting apps (Including Premiere Pro – about 2Gb in size), converted a few files, and within days, the size was over 12Gb? It really doesn’t make sense to me why the virtual machine would blow out to that size so quickly. Its also a real annoyance when you want to backup/copy your virtual machine elsewhere for safe keeping, and your file is unmanageable.
Thankfully, the folks at VMWare have provided a solution to this bloat. Open VMWare Fusion, but don’t open any virtual machines. From the menu, select “Window” and then “Virtual Machine Library”. Right click on your obese machine and select “Get Info”.
You will now see a summary of your Virtual Machine.
You can see from above, I can reclaim over 7Gb of size! Click the “Clean Up Virtual Machine” button.
Now is one of those “Go get yourself a cup of coffee” moments. It does take a while, so be prepared for some down time.
Presto! The 12Gb Virtual Machine is now a much more manageable 5.2Gb!
Can you give an idea for about how long this takes to do? I started mine up 30 minutes ago and it’s still cranking away. The Fusion documentation said there would be a progress bar but all I see is the barber pole thing with no progress indicated.
I’ll answer my own question…cleaning up a 40GB Win7 OS file took about 2 hours and reduced it to 25GB. Hope this helps someone.
Hi There – Yes, it does take some time to complete. I’d recommend starting it before you go to bed for the night, that way it is all done ready to go the next day. Its WELL worth the effort!
Hey there, wonder if you could help me, I’m desperate! I just hit the “clean up virtual machine” button after getting message: “you need to free up 1.5mb of space…” or something like, then for some reason cancelled the operation after a few mins thinking well I’ll just dump some movies off HD instead. Now windows has a “a disc read error has occurred press ctrl+alt+del” and there’s 17gigs of memory back on my mac HD. Whoops!! so it looks like I’ve gone and wiped everything off VMware fusion. can you please offer any help at all? do I need to reinstall windows? i’ve got windows XP pro in my ~documents/virtual machines, so maybe best is to completely wipe and restart VMware? Any help greatly appreciated
Its sure not sounding very good. If there is nothing of any great value on that virtual machine, then the quickest and easiest way would be to delete it and reinstall. However, if there is something in there you need to recover, let me know and I will try to crash one of mine in the same manor and test if its possible to recover, and hey, it might make a good article for this site!