The disk space of VMware virtual machine cannot be properly reclaimed / VMware虚拟机的磁盘空间无法被正确回收

[Ada The]

My virtual machine's internal operating system shows that the disk is only using 88.8GB, but the virtual machine disk files in the host machine occupy up to 517GB.
Virtual disks are allocated on demand, not 'immediately allocate all space', and after the virtual machine shuts down, the disk space is correctly reclaimed, but the size of virtual disk files does not decrease.
And due to excessive occupancy, virtual disks cannot be fragmented or expanded.

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我的虚拟机内部操作系统显示磁盘仅使用了88.8GB，但是宿主机中虚拟机磁盘文件占用高达517GB。

虚拟磁盘是按需分配的，并不是“立马分配所有空间”，且虚拟机关机后显示磁盘空间正确回收，但虚拟磁盘文件的大小并没有变小。

并且由于占用过大，虚拟磁盘不能进行碎片整理以及扩容操作。

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WindowsVersion：Windows 10, 64-bit (Build 19044.6093) 10.0.19044

VMwareVersion：17.6.3 build-24583834

[RaSystemlord]

I'm not sure what you mean by "cannot be fragmented or expanded", because to reclaim an unused place is just the opposite: Compact. You can do defragmentation, too, which may or may not be helping to Compact.

If you have a Snapshot (not sure what your screenshots are showing or not showing), then you can NOT reclaim space. The reason is that if there is a Snapshot, then nothing is ever deleted, but just marked as deleted. In this case, you have to remove first ALL Snapshots in order to reclaim space.

[Ada The]

@RaSystemlord

At present, this virtual machine does not have any snapshots.
The meaning of 'cannot be fragmented or expanded' is that currently this virtual disk cannot be accessed by disk utilities (as shown in 'Attachment-2').

[RaSystemlord]

Ada The: OK, but the utilities are in VMware. 

Just select Virtual Machine Settings, when it is not in use, and from there select the disk drive in question on the left. Then you will have the VMware Utilities for Defragmentation and Compact ... and others not discussed now.