https://blog.lazy-evaluation.net/enContents © 2025 <a href="mailto:dzu@member.fsf.org">Detlev Zundel</a> Wed, 10 Dec 2025 16:16:35 GMTNikola (getnikola.com)http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rsshttps://blog.lazy-evaluation.net/posts/reclaiming-vm-space-virtualbox.html?pk_campaign=feedDetlev Zundel<div><img alt="Compress Image" class="align-center" src="https://blog.lazy-evaluation.net/images/compress.png" style="width: 300px;"> <p>Creating a virtual machine requires specifying the amount of space to allocate for the virtual hard disk as one of the first steps. Dreading the notorious "not enough disk space" message, one usually aims to be on the safe side and reserves a generous amount at this stage. If the assignment is done in a static fashion then the allocated space is immediately claimed from the underlying file system and one thus has to come up with a pretty good guess in order not to waste space. Thankfully most VM solutions allow dynamic allocations which can grow on demand limited only by an upper bound making this a very attractive choice.</p> <p>A newly created VM with such an dynamic disk image indeed starts out nice and space saving but over time the image will eventually take up all the committed underlying disk space even though the VM reports to use only a subset of it. Reflecting on why this is the case leads us to an elegant setup reclaiming unused storage space on the host system.</p> <p><a href="https://blog.lazy-evaluation.net/posts/reclaiming-vm-space-virtualbox.html?pk_campaign=feed">Read more…</a> (6 min remaining to read)</p></div>ssdvirtualboxvmhttps://blog.lazy-evaluation.net/posts/reclaiming-vm-space-virtualbox.htmlMon, 20 Jan 2020 21:14:32 GMT