A VMware virtual machine has several functions which can be used to install software or browsing or perform any task which a physical machine is capable of doing. However many times virtual machine slows down and affects the functionalities of the system. This is because of fragmented sectors in the virtual hard disk that is attached to the virtual machine. Disk defragmentation is a utility provided by Microsoft to its OS present in the ‘System tools’ category. It analyses the fragmented disk space, bad sectors and clusters present and fixes them, but it is a very time taking process when done from within the Windows.
VMware provides a functionality to defragment its virtual hard drive externally, i.e. without starting the Windows installed in it. This process is comparatively fast to the one that of Windows and can be performed very easily in few simple steps:
- Log on to Windows and initialize the VMware Workstation program.
- From the sidebar, choose the virtual machine that you want to defragment.
- In the Commands window, click Edit virtual machine settings.
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- From the displayed device list, choose Hard Disk from the left pane.
- Under the Capacity section, from the Utilities drop-down list box, choose to Defragment.
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- After choosing to defragment, VMware workstation will start defragmenting disk space automatically (The process will take just a few moments).
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- After successful completion of defragmentation, a dialog box will be shown saying the process successfully completed.
- Click OK.
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- Close down the Settings window, and you can start using the VMware virtual machine more efficiently.
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