Bloated VMDK

[asawyer13]

I am currently using VMWare Workstation Pro 17.5.1. My vmdk files are growing and I have not been able to find a way to shrink them. I have tried various techniques that I've found on the internet, Defragging, etc, but nothing has worked. It says I have plenty of free space in the VMDK but it won't free it up.

Is this something the V2V could fix?? Maybe convert from VMDK to something and then back to VMDK?

If it can be done, can you explain which format to convert to?

Thanks
Alan

[yaroslav (staff)]

V2V Does not dedupe or defrag. It converts the files pretty much "as is". In other words, it does not do anything with the disk or partition, making it occupy less.
I think you might benefit from deduplication (check out dedupe analyzer first https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resour ... -analyzer/).