Shrink win2008 vmdk?

[beckhamk]

I know how to increase a vm's hard drive size from vsphere and win2008's disk manager. I know how to shrink using win2008 disk manager. But what i dont know how to do is shrink the size of the vmdk after shrinking a win2008 partition using disk manager.

[Troy_Clavell]

I would say the most effective way would be to use VMware Converter.

[AndreTheGiant]

Or you use VMware Converter, or you add another disk (and move your data and change the letter), or you can try to converter the disk to thin disk (but if free space was not cleaned you will not save much space).

Andre

[beckhamk]

ouch... i was hoping for an easier path than to have to use converter. I am so surprised we can increase the size of a vmdk while the vm is online, but not shrink it.

[Anders_Gregerse]

Not being at my ESX installation I would believe that you can use the same commandline tool that creates vmdk files to shrink it. It changes the size of the vmdk to the specified size regardless of what the current size is. Since I've not done it before either (only grown them), I would create a vm to play with.

[Rumple]

ouch... i was hoping for an easier path than to have to use converter. I am so surprised we can increase the size of a vmdk while the vm is online, but not shrink it.

remember that you used to be able to do that, but because vmware doesn't see into the vm it can't help you if you take your 20gb of data and put it on a disk thats 10GB in size. I'd guess too many people made mistakes so they removed it.