MacOS / VMware Fusion / generic/debian12 - vmware-toolbox-cmd says: shrinking is disabled

[fredowski]

Summary

vmware-toolbox-cmd in MacOS/VMware Fusion/Linux cannot shrink the disk

Details

Thanks for your nice vagrant machines! I just installed generic/debian12 on MacOS Monterey with VMware Fusion 13.5.1. I provisioned some software via ansible and everything works as expected. During my install procedures I consume quite some additional space on the disk which is not needed lateron. So at the moment the disk size for the machine is 15G on MacOS. The vm reports 11G. When I run vmware-toolbox-cmd to shrink the disk, I see the following:

caeuser@debian12:~$ df -H .
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3       133G   12G  114G  10% /
caeuser@debian12:~$ sudo vmware-toolbox-cmd disk list
Shrink disk is disabled for this virtual machine.

Shrinking is disabled for linked clones, parents of linked clones, 
pre-allocated disks, snapshots, or due to other factors. 
See the User's manual for more information.
caeuser@debian12:~$ 

I have another machine in VMware fusion which I booted directly in VMware from the iso image. That is also debian -12. There the shrinking works as describe above via vmware-toolbox-cmd. Is it possible that your machine uses the "linked clone" feature? When I look in the vmware machine inside the .ansible directory I see:

-rw-r--r--   1 fritz  staff         8192 18 Mai 07:49 generic-debian12-vmware-x64-0.scoreboard
-rw-------   1 fritz  staff  12322340864 18 Mai 11:35 generic-debian12-vmware-x64-000001.vmdk
drwxrwxrwx   3 fritz  staff           96 18 Mai 09:09 generic-debian12-vmware-x64-000001.vmdk.lck
-rw-r--r--   1 fritz  staff         8192 18 Mai 07:38 generic-debian12-vmware-x64-1.scoreboard
-rw-r--r--   1 fritz  staff         8192 18 Mai 07:31 generic-debian12-vmware-x64-2.scoreboard
-rw-------   1 fritz  staff        28727 17 Mai 23:22 generic-debian12-vmware-x64-Snapshot1.vmsn
-rw-r--r--   1 fritz  staff         8684 18 Mai 05:17 generic-debian12-vmware-x64.nvram
-rw-r--r--   1 fritz  staff          843 18 Mai 09:33 generic-debian12-vmware-x64.plist
-rw-r--r--   1 fritz  staff         8192 18 Mai 09:09 generic-debian12-vmware-x64.scoreboard
-rw-r--r--   1 fritz  staff   3246194688 17 Mai 23:22 generic-debian12-vmware-x64.vmdk
drwxrwxrwx   3 fritz  staff           96 18 Mai 09:09 generic-debian12-vmware-x64.vmdk.lck
-rw-r--r--   1 fritz  staff          465 17 Mai 23:22 generic-debian12-vmware-x64.vmsd
-rw-r--r--   1 fritz  staff         3650 18 Mai 09:17 generic-debian12-vmware-x64.vmx
drwxrwxrwx   3 fritz  staff           96 18 Mai 08:43 generic-debian12-vmware-x64.vmx.lck
-rw-r--r--   1 fritz  staff          282 17 Mai 23:22 generic-debian12-vmware-x64.vmxf
-rw-r--r--   1 fritz  staff          301 17 Mai 23:22 info.json
-rw-r--r--   1 fritz  staff           53 17 Mai 23:22 metadata.json
-rw-r--r--   1 fritz  staff         1038 18 Mai 09:09 startMenu.plist
-rw-r--r--   1 fritz  staff       193193 18 Mai 07:54 vmware-0.log
-rw-r--r--   1 fritz  staff       197032 18 Mai 07:39 vmware-1.log
-rw-r--r--   1 fritz  staff       200311 18 Mai 07:37 vmware-2.log
-rw-r--r--   1 fritz  staff       187877 18 Mai 11:31 vmware.log
Fredo:7727efcf-9e37-44ba-ac9d-d42e14d16128 fritz$ 

So it seems that there is the 3G vmdk file and then a 12G vmdk file.

For me it would be nice if the generated machine could also lateron shrink the disk size.