Shrinking vmdk

[gemini3]

Hello,

I have a large vmdk I want to shrink because the storage is running out of space.

It is a 2.5 TB which should be resized to 800 GB. Unfortunately this is the only disk of the server, so OS and data resides on the same disk but in different partitions.

I found this tutorial how to accomplish it without using converter: Shrink a VMware Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) – virtualman

Has anyone tried this already?

Because the VM storage has to be migrated at the end of the process, I guess the target storage needs to meet at least the size of the resized disk (in my case 800 GB).

I'm asking because the migration process checks the storage size and will probably ask for 2.5 TB.

Are there any other ways to safely resize my vmdk?

Converter is very slow, so it will exceed my time slot

Thank you.

Regards

[jburen · Accepted solution]

Personally, I haven't tried this but the steps seems legit. But I think I would try it before doing it on a production VM. And ALWAYS create a backup.

[birend1988]

Please refer this KB. This will help you to speed up the process.

VMware Knowledge Base

[gemini3]

I did it and it worked very well and fast too 🙂

One thing, after changing the file descriptor the migration process checks the target storage and wont cintinue if it doensn't mtach the original size of the vmdk (before shrinking).

That was a difference to my test lab which migrated the vmdk to a smaller target storage than the original vmdk was. Don't know why.