HOW-TO: Shrink a VM

Overview
Use "expanding" drives? This often can lead to physical drive footprints larger than needed especially after installing and cloning. Shrinking will recover most of the unused space with the virtual disk and thereby free up physical space.

Prerequisites

• There cannot be any snapshots (if you have snapshots, then to shrink it you need to use VMWare Converter first, then this)
  
• VMWare tools needs to be installed
  

Shrink Steps
To "shrink" a disk do the following:

• Start the virtual machine.
  
• Defrag all of the drives
  
  • Start > Settings > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Defragmenter
    
• Double-click on the VMWare tools in the system tray
  
• Click on the Shrink tab.
  
• Select the drive(s) to shrink.
  
• Click on the Prepare to Shrink button.