These steps are performed first on a Debian, Ubuntu, and then on a Windows guest machine. We can do this in a few steps: we clean up any unnecessary things from the machine that we don’t need (e.g., unused programs, remove unnecessary files, empty the recycle bin, etc.), and then overwrite the empty space on the storage device with zeros with a program designed for that purpose. So, if we have made sure that our target VirtualBox storage device is of dynamically growing type, then we must first prepare the virtual machine to shrink the connected storage device.vdi file. Preparing a virtual machine for shrinking Properties icon, and at the bottom of the panel, select Information tab and make sure that "Dynamically Growing Storage" appears in the storage details. So on any platform you use VirtualBox, in the virtual media management panel, select the storage device you want to shrink and then click above. To do this, start VirtualBox and then File In the menu, start Virtual Media Manager. These include skipping links to skip parts we don’t need.įirst, we check if the virtual storage device you want to shrink is indeed of the dynamically growing type, because only this can be shrunk. In this description, the virtual machine is also compressed / shrunk with Linux / Windows guest and host machines, so each variation takes place. For example, after a recent installation of Windows or Linux, you will not be able to use this method unless you have downloaded several GB of data to the virtual machine and then deleted it later. Of course, this method only works with dynamic-sized storage devices, not fixed-size ones, and we can only shrink an image file in the storage if it already had data that was deleted, so the image file size increased but did not shrink back after deletion. In this tutorial, we’ll look at how to manually shrink the dynamically growing image files of our VirtualBox virtual machines to their actual usable size on Linux and Windows - saving a lot of space on our computer. This is unfortunately not true backwards, so if you delete something from the virtual machine, for example, the size of the physical image file on the virtual storage device will unfortunately not be reduced. first when installing an operating system). VirtualBox also provides the ability to use dynamically growing storage, which allows you to create drives that are (virtually) the same fixed size, but the physical image files themselves are only a few megabytes in size when created and increase in use depending on the amount of data loaded (e.g. The image file of a virtual machine can take up a lot of space on its own, but if we have several machines, we have to reckon with a significant amount of storage space, so it is advisable to make optimal use of our available storage space. Of these, we now turn to the size of storage devices. VirtualBox allows you to run virtual machines on your computer that share the computer's hardware resources with the host operating system. Shrink a virtual machine on a Windows host.Shrinking a virtual machine on a Linux host.Shrink a virtual machine using VirtualBox.Fill in empty blocks with zeros in SDelete.Filling empty blocks with zeros in zerofree.Restart virtual machine in recovery mode.Clear unused packages and the package cache.Preparing a virtual machine for shrinking. Start by downloading the VDI file.ĭownload: Ubuntu 22. Various operating systems are available as easy-to-use disk images for VirtualBox and VMware at These are available in VDI format, a virtual disk image you can easily load in VirtualBox. You could try a pre-configured disk image that you can load directly in VirtualBox. You'll learn how to install Ubuntu-but what if you want to get it up and running immediately? It's straightforward but a little intensive and takes a while. The rest of this guide will show you how to install Ubuntu in VirtualBox. It acts as the flagship Ubuntu operating system if you experience problems, support can be found, and bug fixes issued.ĭownload: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Install a Pre-Configured Ubuntu VirtualBox Disk "Long Term Support" means the operating system receives targeted updates for five years after the point of release. The safest option if you're trying it for the first time is an LTS release. Various versions of Ubuntu are available.
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