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I have a lot of VMWare machines lurking in my storage.  For whatever reason that made sense at the time, I created them with disks that were split into multiple files.  I didn’t know this until recently, you can actually consolidate all of them into a single file without breaking the VM.  I want to do this anyway, since I have heard somewhere that it can improve performance especially on non SSD mechanical drives.

In command prompt, navigate to where you have VMWare installed.  For me it was

C:\Program Files (x86)\VMware\VMware Workstation

In that folder you can use the vmware-vdiskmanager.exe program to perform this operation

vmware-vdiskmanager -r MyVirtualMachineDisk.vmdk -t 0 SingleDiskFile.vmdk

Replace MyVirtualMachineDisk.vmdk with the full path and file name of the first file of your split VMware disk set.

The “-t 0” means to turn it into a “single growable virtual disk“.  If you would rather pre-allocate all the storage for the disk, use “-t 2” instead, which means “preallocated virtual disk.”

You can view more command line options by running the vmware-vdiskmanager.exe with no parameters.

After the operation is complete, you will want to delete the original VMware disk set.  Then rename the output SingleDiskFile.vmdk file to whatever the original name was for the first file of your original VMware disk set.  Also make sure it is moved to the same folder where the original files were before so that the VMWare machine can find it again when it is started back up.

Posted By: Roberto Sebestyen

VMWare consolidate, disk, management, virtual, vmdk, VMWare

I use a VMWare virtual machine for development.  Lately though, I have been having issues with my disk thrashing uncontrollably, slowing everything to a crawl.   This especially seemed to happen right after suspending my VM.  The disk thrashing seemed to go on for a good 10 minutes before it came back to normal.  This made my host machine completely unusable during this time. …Read more…

Posted By: Roberto Sebestyen

VMWare, Windows Tweaks, VMWare

I got home today and woke up my pc from hibernate.  I always have Process Explorer running in my task bar, so as I was waiting for Firefox to start up, I noticed that my CPU was pinned at about 70% usage, it wasn’t Firefox.  It was VMware-authd.exe.   I do have VMWare installed but I have not touched it on this machine for years.

Being concerned I turned to the all-knowing Google.  The answer came in the form of a blog post by Christopher Miller, who suffered the exact same issue.

Here is his post, hope this helps other VMWare users out there:

I was doing some work on one of my PC’s and I had the processes list open in Task Manager. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that one process, VMware-authd.exe, was going from 0 to 10% of the CPU. I didn’t know what that process did, I went out on a limb and assumed that it was somehow related to VMWare. VMware is one of my favorite tools, but I wasn’t running any VMWare sessions. Time to go Googling. Apparently it’s a service that provides administrator priviledges to to a running VMWare session if the host use isn’t logged in with administrator access rights

If you are logged in with admin rights, you don’t need to have this service running. VMware-authd.exe is the name of the executable for the “VMware Authorization Service” service. You can go into Services and shut that service down and then set it’s startup type to “manual”. There are no other services that depend on that service to be running. You can also stop the service from the Windows command line with the following:

net stop VMAuthdService

Posted By: Roberto Sebestyen

VMWare, Windows VMWare