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Why is a VM with Dynamic Disk Expanding when the contents of the VM os has space available

Chris Muller 0 Reputation points
2023-04-18T12:10:05.3666667+00:00

Running a server where a tech had set the Disk to Dynamically expand which now matches the total size of the disk. When I connect to the VM. in the OS the Disk has around 200+- GB of Free available space but every time I launch the VM it expands to take the whole physical disk space and then goes into a paused Critical State. When the VM is off there is also about 80Gb +- of available space which gets consumed almost instantly when starting the VM. I have a solution coming up to convert to a static disk size once I get more storage in the server but I would like to understand why it consumes the space on start up and why it expands to take space on the Physical host when space is available in the Operating system running in the VM.

Hyper-V
Hyper-V
A Windows technology providing a hypervisor-based virtualization solution enabling customers to consolidate workloads onto a single server.
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  1. Limitless Technology 44,121 Reputation points
    2023-04-20T09:30:37.9966667+00:00

    Hello Thank you for your question and reaching out. I can understand you are having query\issues related to VM Disk. It might be that you have used more disk space at some point, and now you only use about some GB of disk space, Dynamically expanding virtual disks will grow as needed, but they will not release any space even if you delete data from the disk. You can check actual disk space by Edit the Disk -> Click inspect Disk. You can try to convert this Dynamic disk to Fixed disk or Shrink then Compact the Disk to lowest possible. --If the reply is helpful, please Upvote and Accept as answer--