I configure guest disks as single file un-allocated. Over a short period of time (a few months) the used disk space on the guest remains relatively constant but the physical space used by the guest increases by a considerable amount. This occurs because of how the guest OS writes data to the disk. It does not necessarily use free disk space at the beginning of the guest disk. Instead it will tend to start at a point on the disk where it last left off thereby increasing the physical size even though there is free space within the existing allocation. My question is how I can configure the guest OS (Windows, Linux, etc) to use any free space at the beginning of the virtual disk vs appending it on to the end causing the physical disk to grow unnecessarily?
I now use the VMWare 'compact' virtual disk option to reduce the physical size of a guest disk. But that is a time consuming process and it generates more wear on the NVME drive than I would like.
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