VMware player disk clean up

Question

I am currently running the free version of VMware player which corresponds to workstation 10. I am trying to figure out how to run the disk clean up utility to free up space on the virtual drive. I am currently using a windows 8.1 host and using VMware to run Ubuntu.

Answer 1

You probably already know that you can compact a virtual disk drive from the Vmware Player Gui - select the drive on the 'Hardware' tab and choose 'Compact'. There needs to be enough spare space on the host drive to make a duplicate of the current (uncompacted) file.

However the resulting file may not be as small as you would expect because lots of unused space on the client drive holds defunct data, and the compaction routine is not clever enough to understand that this can be ignored.

There is a linux script recover-space which you can run on the client machine to zero all of this unused space and thus make the drive suitable for optimal compaction by Vmware Player. I've used it several times with success. The instructions say 'Under the hood all it does is to write null data to the unused space on the filesystem until it is full and then free it up. Because this filesystem will be momentarily full at the end of this process you are strongly advised not to write to it while this is underway.'