I was checking out a server today (2003) and noticed that it was a tad low on disk space on the OS disk. It’s a terminal server and it is not heavily used (heavily meaning many users) but there are a handful of users who are in it multiple times throughout the day.
I ran my standard temporary files cleanup batch file to clear up any user profile temp files as well as Internet Explorer temp files. Freed up about 500MB which was nice but I was still not satisfied with total available disk space remaining so I investigated further. Fired up the trusty TreeSize Free and let it scan C: disk.
Upon inspection I saw one particular user had almost 100MB data files in their profile directory under Application DataVMware. There were tons of vmwaretray-xxx.dmp files. The files were about 650KB each!
After some quick research online, I discovered the reason these files are there are because when the user logs onto the terminal server they do not have permission to read a particular key from the registry that the VMware Tray icon accesses at logon.
One option was to change the permissions so users could read the key, but I am not fond of that, plus on an update I’m sure it’d come back around to bite me in the ass.
The other option, I found out, is that I can disable the VMware Tray icon from loading when a user logs on which will in turn not generate a VMwaretray dump file. Sweet!
I wanted to see how bad the damage was from these VMwaretray dump files so I first set a filter in TreeSize Free to only calculate VMWARETRAY\* files. 4GB+!!! HOLY SHIT!
Now, I’ve added this path into the cleanup script I typically run and it cleared up the files with no problem.
To make VMware Tray icon not load for users, you can modify the registry.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\VMware, Inc.\VMware Tools
Look for ShowTrayIcon and set it’s value to zero (0).
Next time users log on this should not load the tray icon. =)
Here’s a screenshot of TreeSize showing some massive amount of space used up by VMwaretray dump files!
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