I have written about shrinking the virtual disk of an OS X Virtual Machine here but recently I needed to shrink a Linux virtual machine. The process is almost identical across all of VMware’s products you just have to find the vmware-vdiskmanager tool.
The process In most operating systems removing the files from the disk merely alters file tables so the operating system sees the space as free on the disk.
Reducing the size of a guest OS X Virtual Machines’s vmdk file requires a few steps. For a Windows VM’s, there is a tool from VMWare with a GUI. Unfortunately, there is not an equivalent tool for the Mac guest VM.
This technique has tested and confirmed on OS X 10.9.2 using VMware Fusion 6.02 though it should work from 10.7 and up. This assumes your guest vm’s disk is not pre-allocated, and the virtual machine does not have any snapshots.
