Vmware Virtual Disk File .Exe Microsoft SDelete

Periodically working with virtual machines (vms), enough files are created and deleted that the thin provisioned virtual disk (vdisk) expands to its maximum capacity even though the operating system (OS) file system shows free space.

Unfortunately, this consumes space on the underlying storage that is no longer being active used with the VM OS.

Vmware Virtual Disk File .Exe Microsoft SDelete

For years I have been using the sdelete.exe Microsoft SDelete tool that securely erases deleted files using the option to just write zeros to all remaining free space.

In Linux, I use the dd tool to read from devzero and write to a temporary file filling all free space with zeros then deleting the temporary file.

VMware and network storage systems will see these zeros and free allocated storage space to the virtual disk.

In essence, this shrinks the virtual file size on storage freeing unused space on the storage system.

Others you need to run a command line on ESXi to free the zeroed space.

The graphical disk utility in Utilities menu and a command line too.

I havent had much luck with the GUI tool, so this procedure uses the command line tool.

Now run the too and write some zeros diskutil secureErase freespace 0 disk02 where.

There are 5 levels, we want level 0 for single-pass zeros freespace only write zeros to free, unused space.

Does not affect files or OS 0 secureErase level 0 single-pass zeros disk0s2 my partition that has my data I have a SSD drive so it is pretty quick.

The progress bar will indicate how long the zero write will take.

First SSH to the ESXi hot and login as root (there are other methods but I use SSH to esxi to run the command line tools).

For example on my VM, I used the command vmkfstools -K vmfsvolumesdatastore1MacOSMasterMacOSMaster.vmdk The starting size of the VM was 105GB with used and non-shared at 95GB.

After zero write procedure, the provisioned size was still 105GB the used and not-shared were now 57GB.

If the VM has frequent file writes and deletes, the used space will slowly increase again and eventually warrant another shrinking.

If it is very frequent and expands the virtual disk to capacity in a short time, it may not be worth the effort to shrink the virtual disk.

My web tools and Android Apps are simple, easy and admittedly lack design elements.

Vmware Virtual Disk File For Mac Osx