ESX 3.5 update 4

While the 2008 vm was on and running, I increased the disk from 25 gigs to 40 gigs. I then went into the OS and tried to expand the servers disk (without any reboots). The operation finished, but with an error. What resulted was annoying. In Disk Management on the 2008 server, the drive now showed as a complete 40 gig disk. In My Computer on the 2008 server it still showed as 25 gigs. A reboot didn't do anything. I needed to reduce the drive back to only 25 gigs as the extra space (they changed their minds) was to be added as an extra drive instead. So I decided to use converter to suck up the vm and resize the drive on the fly.

But when I connected with Converter, it showed the drive being 40 gigs large, but 39 gigs full. Hence I could not reduce the size. I logged into the server to confirm that there was free space, it was really only 24 gigs full so the operation should have worked.

At this point I decided to make a hot clone of the vm so I could troubleshoot it without worrying about it. In the clone I decided to use the shrink feature. When I did it showed that the drive could only be shrunk by 1 gig from 40 gigs to 39 gigs, because it saw the drive 39 gigs full as well. I decided to go through with the operation hoping that the process would flush out the bug. When I shrunk it, it took what seemed like 5 minutes to complete and I though I was stuck. Finally, the process completed and to my excitement it reduced it the full 16 gigs despite the earlier message that only 1 gig was available to shrink.

At that point I used converter to connect to the clone and was able to successfully suck it up and reduce the drive space. Once the new clone was up and running I turned off the original and the clone, removed their networking (just in case they were turned off, I am keeping them for a week or so to make sure everything is going to keep working well.) So far everything looks good.

I just wanted to share my information, what happened and what worked to solve the issue if anyone else finds themselves in this situation. I searched the forums and couldn't find anything that quite matched my situation.

Thank you,

Matthew

Kaizen!