I know this has been discussed before, but I can't find a situation quite like mine and wanted to make sure I had all my options in front of me before I did anything.This is on a box with ESXi 4.1, build 260247.
I have a VM with two virtual disks: one for the OS, and one for Data. The one for data is 1.6TB and has two partitions: 1.1TB and a 500GB. I'd like to remove the 500GB partition, and then shrink the virtual disk by 500GB so that I can use that space on other VM's.
The most popular way I've found in my research is to use the VMware converter to make a copy of it and adjust the size of the disks. That however, doesn't seem like a very viable option. There's no extra local storage to place the convertered VM files on, so it would have to be written to a network device of some sort. That combined with the fact that I would have to copy the OS partition over too(which I don't need), makes this option way too slow.
My only idea is to copy all of the data off of the Data virtual disk, either to a network device or a USB drive(through the USB passthrough), delete the virtual disk, recreate it with the appropriate size, and copy the data back.
Is there an easier/quicker way to do this? I'd appreciate any help.
Thanks.
