Is it possible to shrink or expand a thin provisioned disk? If so, can this be done when the VM is powered on? Are there any third party tools that are needed/required?
i.e. Lets say you have 2 VM's both have 50 GB thin provisioned disks and are on a 100 GB LUN (no I dont make them that small, its just an example)...
Now lets say that VM-A is only utilizing 10 GB of its thin provisioned disk and VM-B is utilizing 48 GB. Would it be possible to shrink the allocation from VM-A to a 20 GB thin provisioned disk and VM-B would then have an 80 GB thin provisioned disk. For this instance the servers are Windows 2003 or Windows 2008 servers. I'm not on vSphere 4.0 just yet but I was curious if there was a way to play around with the "unallocated" disk that is seen in Windows.
The reason I ask is because if you can do this then I cant wait to get onto vSphere. We have alot of unused allocated space that constantly has us battling with people over partition sizes because we technically run out of SAN space so fast. If I can take unallocated space from people who realize after the fact, "hey I really didnt need a 100 GB D:\ partition I only needed 10 GB", it would save me time of trying to shuffle around disk space using converter and shrinking drives.
