I have a version of Asterisk pbx running on vmware virtual machine on a Windows host. This configuration (pbx-in-a-flash) is extremely stable running more than 6 months without interruption. Also, this serves my needs of home office more than enough.
Now, bad news part.. Not being a physical machine has tremendous advantage (like easy backup, easy creation, easy porting etc), but its virtual disk is not as easy to maintain as with physical disk. My configuration is dynamic virtual disk mode in which it allocates storage space as needed. But when you delete some files, it just marks them as deleted without actually shrinking it.
The pbx virtual disk keeps growing along with constant addition of audio recording files (like phone recordings, voice mail etc). Only solution to this is to manually shrink the virtual disk offline. In case of windows guest virtual machine, you just log into the guest system, then runs WMware tool on task bar. In a linux guest like Asterisk, it is done from Windows host using WMware tools “vmware-vdiskmanager.exe”.
I’ve followed an instruction from a site found with Google, but strange.. it simply didn’t work. I have deleted almost 1GB out of 5GB total. After shriking done, no error message.. it just displayed like “shrinking succeeded”. But, the virtual disk size remains 99.9% identical! What did I do wrong, here?