VMWare Fusion: Shrinking OSX Image

If you’re using VMWare Fusion for OSX, and you’ve got few images of older OSX releases, odds are you might have over-alloc’ed the disk space… you can never know how much it’s really gonna be required!

Steps to fix this are:

  1. Launch the OSX image that requires shrinking
  2. Open Disk Utility App
  3. Pick the Disk, click over the Partition tab, and reduce the partition’s size, as much as possible
  4. Shutdown the Virtual Machine

Once ready, you’ll need to locate the VMDK file of your image: it can be found inside the Image.vmwarevm bundle.

We’ll need to perform two final steps. Let’s fire Terminal, and head over to this location: /Applications/VMware\ Fusion.app/Contents/Library/

Once there, you may run the following commands, which will defragment the image, and free the empty space:

./vmware-vdiskmanager -d [PATH TO VMDK]
./vmware-vdiskmanager -k [PATH TO VMDK]

Hope you find it useful!

Update:
Alternative method involves installing VMWare Tools in the host machine, and running the following command:
sudo /Library/Application\ Support/VMware\ Tools/vmware-tools-cli disk shrink /

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