W7 guest : why my VM is too fat ?

Discussions about using Windows guests in VirtualBox.
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Alexis81
Posts: 6
Joined: 26. May 2021, 09:59

W7 guest : why my VM is too fat ?

Post by Alexis81 »

Hi,
I have a problem with all my VM Win7. I use a VDi and allow 100Giga for size file. The host is W10-64b.
With all update of softwar, size of virtual disk is 60g but VDi file increase to 100g. The VM is slowed down.
How to solve this ?
Thank you very much for your help.
mpack
Site Moderator
Posts: 39156
Joined: 4. Sep 2008, 17:09
Primary OS: MS Windows 10
VBox Version: PUEL
Guest OSses: Mostly XP

Re: W7 guest : why my VM is too fat ?

Post by mpack »

The amount of space collectively used by guest files has nothing to do with anything. VirtualBox has no way to know about guest files. All VirtualBox knows is what drive sectors have been written to.

Btw, allocating the full drive capacity of 100GB does not slow the VM down. The VM only slows down if busy and possibly incorrectly configured.

You can temporarily shrink the VDI using compaction, but if the guest process that originally wrote to all the sectors is still running then it will just pop back up to 100GB again. I.e. make sure you have all background disk maintenance tasks turned off, and don't deliberately run tasks (e.g. low level format, secure erase) that write to every sector.
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