How to reduce the size of a virtual machine

For a Windows Virtual Machine:

1.- Go to Control Panel and Uninstall any unnecesarry software that's installed on that virtual machine and you don't need.

2.- Upgrade Your VMware Tools

• If You don't have VMware Tools installed on your virtual machine: In VMWare Fusion go to the "Virtual Machine" menu and click on "Install VMware Tools" and they'll automatically be in the newest version.

• If you already have VMware Tools installed, check that it's up to date. Click on the VMware Tools icon in the windows notification area. Go to the "Options" tab and if the "Update Tools" is not greyed out click it to upgrade your VMware Tools.

3.- Run the Disk Cleanup Tool in windows to save some extra space.

4.- Open you're VMware Tools again and select the "shrink Tab".

5.- Now select all the hard drives in the virtual machine and click "Prepare to shrink" the VMware tools will prepare the virtual machine hard drives to shrink them.

At this step, you may get a warning that the VM cannot be shrunk because either the space was pre-allocated when the VM was created or there are snapshots in the VM. I found that by deleting my snapshots, I was then able to shrink the VM. I'm not sure yet what one can do if the VM was created with pre-allocated space.

6.- After this process is completed you will be prompted if you want to shrink the hard drives now. When you click ok the virtual machine will be put on hold until this process finishes.