Recovery of under used Disk capacity?

[rmdaviesCDN]

I need to recover large amounts of under used thickly provisioned disk space.  Both from the VM OS and the Storage Subsystem.  To accomplish these two tasks I have written out the following process.

1. Snaphot the VM
2. Right size the under utilized drive, within the OS. (mostly Windows of various flavors) using diskpart.
   • If there is data on the partition, would this be data destructive?
3. Reboot the VM to have the diskpart changes written to the virtual disk.
4. Verify that the data on the correctly sized disk is still useable by the OS and applications.
   • If not, would using the Snapshot in Step 1 work to recover from this type of data "corruption"?
   • If the data is intact, in Step 4, delete the Snapshot from Step 1.
5. Storage Vmotion the now "right sized" VM to a new thinly provisioned Datastore? Vacating the source Datastore completely....

Can someone tell me with certainity that this will or will not work?

Thx,

M.

[sparrowangelste]

if you usestorage vmotion then you can convert to thin disks when you move it to a different VMFS.

you wouldnt even need to do the other steps.

[a_p_]

Welcome to the Community,

I'm afraid diskpart will not work this way. It' possible to increase the partition size, but you can't decrease the partition size and even if you could, this wouldn't make the virtual disk smaller. What you can do is to use VMware Converter and V2V the VM (I'd recommend you do this with the VM powered off). The converter will allow you to resize the partitions as well as the disk size as required.

André

[continuum]

or use a variant of Andres suggestion and clone large disk to smaller disk with a Ghost-LiveCD - thats faster than Converter but needs more manual work