Recently been researching and testing with VMware images for the deployment of our application at work which turned out to work pretty well (Ubuntu + Java 6 + MySQL + Glassfish). However, one thing which became bothersome was the overgrowing .vmdk images which didn’t seem to reduce in size even after file deletions were made in the virtual disk itself.

Again, Google came to the rescue for this, linking me to this site which gave a 2 step process for doing the shrinking. Do note that the instructions are for those who are using Windows as their host OS.