Drive Compact seams to do nothing.

[jack bayt]

I'm not sure when this started since I have been using vmware for many years. What I am seeing is my virtual drives even when rather empty no longer compact. The compact button for those drives comes back almost instantly.

All of the VM's are windows 10 or windows 11. No encryption. Trim is enabled and I even tried using sdelete with -z option, makes no difference. All are set to growable 1TB drives. I can clean most of the stuff out of those drives but compact does not change the physical disk size. This used to work back in the v16 product, maybe it's from v17? I'm not sure when it stopped working since it is something I don't do very often,

So just asking if anyone else has seen this?

For example. I just cleaned out a drive. Windows says it is 0.98TB free out of 0.99TB. So basically empty.  Shut down the vm, hit compact on the drive the .vmdk is over 500GB. Doing defrag does nothing to help. Very strange...

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[jack bayt]

Tried it today with 25.0.0.24995812 No change.

But for the first time I tried doing it in the guest via

VMwareToolBoxCmd.exe disk shrinkonly

And that worked! One of the virtual disks went from about 1TB to just a tad over 200GB. So that is the ticket, for whatever reason the guest toolbox utility does it where all of the other methods do nothing.

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