December 23, 20214 yr When you create a VM it's vdisk is a sparse file. A sparse file saves a huge amount of space on your disk, because data which contains nothing (zeros) is "compressed". But after a while it will become bigger as deleted files are not really deleted. To understand this, we use an example. I created a 32G vdisk for my Windows 10 machine: After installation its size is 15G (as it's a sparse file): file="/mnt/cache/domains/Windows 10/vdisk1.img" du -h "$file" 15G /mnt/cache/domains/Windows 10/vdisk1.img After installing the network driver and some updates it grow to 18G: du -h "$file" 15G /mnt/cache/domains/Windows 10/vdisk1.img After installing this tool inside the Windows VM: https://docs.microsoft.com/de-de/sysinternals/downloads/sdelete and executing this command: sdelete64 -z c: it grow to 30G: du -h "$file" 30G /mnt/cache/domains/Windows 10/vdisk1.img And finally after this command: fallocate -d "$file" It shrunk to 15G again: du -h "$file" 15G /mnt/cache/domains/Windows 10/vdisk1.img The same can be reached with a Linux VM and the command "zerofree". This could be executed once every month.
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