Let me point out that these instructions are not applicable to VMs based on a Boot Camp partition. I’m going to walk you through the process of resizing a Windows 10 VM running on Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac Pro Edition, but the steps are very similar (if not the same) for other operating systems and editions/versions of Parallels Desktop. Bad news? No bad news, but I’ll also share some tips on how to prevent any issues and get them fixed if they arise. The good news is that both of these procedures (shrinking and expanding the VMs) are very similar. On the flipside, users with the latest Mac devices may want to increase the size of their virtual machine(s) for a bigger value. Native hard drives fill up pretty fast, so with the default size of Parallels Desktop virtual machines (64 GB for most OSes), you might have to shrink your VM during or after setup. However, it isn’t the same story for users with an older Mac or MacBook Air owners, who only have between 128 GB and 256 GB available. Do you remember those times when we had to shrink the size of pictures just to save some hard disk space? These days, most PCs and Mac devices come with 500+ GB hard disks-not to mention, we’ve also entered the age of cloud storage. Living in today’s world of “Big Data,” the size of the files we create, share, and store doesn’t matter so much anymore.

Guest blog by Paul Christopher Nathaniel, Parallels Support Team

Mac disk image increase space