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I have a single virtual machine on VMWare Fusion with Windows XP on it. I noticed that I have a bunch of huge vmdk files (several Gb):

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Do I really need them all for a single virtual machine? What are they and can I get rid of some?

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I would guess those are VMWare snapshots of a running system in order to restore from a previous state. When you shutdown your VM's are you using the snapshot/restore feature? – crasic Sep 13 '11 at 8:51
Not anymore. I haven't done that for months. – Fernando Sep 13 '11 at 12:56

2 Answers

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VMware splits its virtual disks into 2GB files so that it's compatible with FAT.

Snapshots are VMSN I think. . .

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By default, VMware Fusion splits virtual disks into 2GB segments. If you create a 20GB virtual disk (the default, I think), you'll end up with 10 vmdk files, each up to 2GB in size. Historically, several applications and filesystems couldn't deal with files larger than 2GB, so this helped users deal with larger virtual disks.

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