I upgraded Workstation Pro on Ubuntu from v15 to v17 in order to upgrade my windows 10 VM to windows 11. I use this VM to run a video camera recording program that only works in winduhs. I have my VM stored on an SSD, and not wanting to flog my SSD with endless recording, I created a virtual disk on a "regular" hard drive.
I allowed windows to upgrade to 11 and all seemed OK for a day or so. Then I was greeted by a message that the machine was paused because of a lack or disk space. VMware WS would not allow any interaction with the VM to remedy the problem, "protecting" me from a lack of disk space. Panicked, I heavy-handedly removed some disk files to make more space on the host. Now my VM became horribly cross-linked through snapshots to a disk that I deleted and could not recover. I bit the bullet and started over...fortunately my windows key worked.
After dicking around with encryption being on and off I finally was able to create a 400GB drive for storing the video recordings. Today, the stupid thing was hosed again...no disk space and it won't let me do anything on the VM to fix it. I removed 2 snapshots, compressed, defragged, and compressed and all that got me was about 7GB.
The SSD partition for my VMs is 301GiB; the VM is allocated 60GB. The partition was at 284GiB, with 4.4 free. This is 6 times the maximum size of the drive. There are a bunch of disk files in this directory with "s" in the name. Somehow, the guest drive location changed in the VM from the video partition to the SSD partition, and is filling up that location instead. But it is not ignoring the storage in the proper recording partition, as the file timestamps are current.
I suspect that encryption has something to do with it, because there is a message in the VM settings that I cannot mount a disk that is part of an encrypted VM.
I want to bomb all the extraneous files used for unneeded storage. Perhaps if I turn off encryption on the machine the problem will go away, but I don't want to repeat my previous blunder.
So:
1: Why is VMware moving the location of my virtual disk? More importantly, how do I prevent it?
2: How do I clean up the crap that it has created in my VM directory without breaking the VM itself?
I would appreciate some help from VMware/Broadcom on this. I have found some aging posts (> 1-3 years) of similar issues. It seems that all the hypervisors may be malfunctioning, not just Workstation. There are multiple catch-22 situations that are making this an impossible situation.
As stated, I had a separate unencrypted (I thought) drive resource for bulk storage. I don't think encryption was enabled on the Win11 VM when I reactivated it. But I discovered (too late) that the stupid VM had started storing data in the VM's guest directory, creating new disk files that were much too big for the space. Eventually the VM home was jammed, and the VM refused to run. I could not free up space because it was consumed by disk files. I could not remove the virtual disk from the VM because "it was part of an encrypted VM". I could not mount the virtual disk because of some of other linking error. Examining the vmdk files, it was apparent that vmware had stupidly and without permission linked my external drive to the primary VM drive and hence sent all the (presumably encrypted) output to its location. Indeed the location of the external drive had changed to the VM's location.
This is dysfunctional behavior that needs to be fixed, or at least explained.
RaSstemlord, please do not reply.