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dusk007

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Dec 5, 2009
3,411
104
I have been wondering what does VMWare need "enough" free disk space on the Mac main boot volume.

I got Win8 running in a VM from its NTFS bootcamp partition. Why does it constantly complain if my free diskspace on the HFS+ Mac partition gets too low? Or is this a bug.
I would understand if it requires dynamic free space if it was running of of a virtual disk stored on the hfs partition, but it isn't. Even a dynamic swap area it should put inside the ntfs partition just fine. It would be the Windows kernel managing that anyway.
 

PaulKemp

macrumors 6502a
Jun 2, 2009
568
124
Norway
I have been wondering what does VMWare need "enough" free disk space on the Mac main boot volume.

I dont understand, who is complaining? OS X, Fusion or the guest OS?

Windows will complain if it has less than a certain percentage left. And even though it's dynamic, the virtualization layer still has to allocate more at a certain point.
 

dusk007

macrumors 68040
Original poster
Dec 5, 2009
3,411
104
Code:
VMware Fusion has paused this virtual machine because 
the disk on which the virtual machine is stored is almost full.
[I]To continue free an additional 106 MB.[/I]
two buttons power off / continure
The strange thing it is VMWare Fusion that is complaining but the disk that the virtual machine is stored on is the bootcamp NTFS which has 21 GB free.
The space it demands seems rather odd too, as the Mac SSD usually has like 2 GB still free when it starts complaining that it wants 50-200 MB of additional space.

OSX is complaining much later when there really is only <300MB left or something. The Guest OS never complains as it never has too little with 20GB free and there swap and hibernation file ... is all already accounted for. It is a 2GB RAM Guest.
 
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