05-04-2012, 11:17 AM

I have a MacBook Air on which I have installed a Win 7 professional virtual machine using VMFusion Ware. I have had this working well for more than a year. My problem is lack of memory. When I click on computer from Win Start it shows 20gb out of 40gb available on the C drive. The virtual machine, however, shows only 1.56 out of 56 gb available in the Shared folders\\vm-host)(Z drive. At times I can't start the machine, or it will suspend with message that it is critically short of resources. Worried about moving things onto the C drive which apparently has plenty of memory

05-04-2012, 02:14 PM

The VMWare virtual machine will expand the VM to accommodate the size of the C drive that's needed. However, the MBA has limited system memory which is likely the problem. And since system memory can not be expanded on the MBA, there's nothing you can do about it.

05-04-2012, 02:25 PM

Can you post more specifics on your machine?
It sounds like an 11" MBA with 2GB of RAM and 64GB hard drive.
If that is the case - then you really want to limit your VM to use 512MB of RAM and a 20GB hard drive. Then store all documents on the Z drive.
40GB is the majority of your main drive if it is 64GB - and if 1.5G is the only thing left then you will have swap issues.

05-04-2012, 02:27 PM

Originally Posted by shastad

When I click on computer from Win Start it shows 20gb out of 40gb available on the C drive. The virtual machine, however, shows only 1.56 out of 56 gb available in the Shared folders\\vm-host)(Z:) drive.

I'm a little confused as to what the differences are here. If the Z drive is mapped to your MBA HD, then yes, you're running out of room.

As pointed out by chscag, VMs can expand the hard drive but won't shrink it. For example, let's say you have a 20GB virtual HD that has 5GB of content. If you add 2GB, the file expands to 7GB which is expected but if you remove the 2GB file, the virtual HD will still be 7GB since it can't shrink. However, Fusion comes with a shrink tool to fix this (read this).

As an aside, if any VirtualBox users here know of a way to shrink virtual HDs, I'd love to know it.