Hey Guys
I recently increased the hard drive size of one of my VM drives to 300GB when I only needed 200GB.
The drive is thick provisioned. From memory I don't think you can shrink a thick provisioned drive from the VMWare 5.5 client.
So my question is, is there an alternate way I can shrink that thick provisioned hard drive so I can recover the unused space?
Kind Regards
Aaron
Yes, technically, if you have a 300 GB windows volume backed by a 300 GB thick .vmdk you could do the following:
That .vmdk will now never take up more that 200 GB unless the windows partition is grown but the .vmdk is thin nonetheless. Otherwise, vmware standalone converter or vmkfstools the way to go. If prefer vmkfstools.
The best and easiest way is V2V conversion which can shrink your thin provision disk and give you the unused space back .
Thanks
HI Anjani_Kumar
Thank you for your reply
Can I do a V2V on just the 1 hard drive?
Also what V2V software do you recommend using?
You can use VMware converter,VMware vCenter Converter: P2V Virtual Machine Converter | VMware United Kingdom, to do V2V conversion, the alternative is to keep the 300GB and make it thin provisioned VMDK by storage vmotion the VM to another datastore.
Hey vfk, I think I might be out of space to move the vm to another location unfortunately. So maybe v2v is my best option.
If there is a way to resize the partitions in a first step with gparted for example - the thick vmdk can be resized with dd.
I admit - that may sound scary for some users - but its possible.
Yes, technically, if you have a 300 GB windows volume backed by a 300 GB thick .vmdk you could do the following:
That .vmdk will now never take up more that 200 GB unless the windows partition is grown but the .vmdk is thin nonetheless. Otherwise, vmware standalone converter or vmkfstools the way to go. If prefer vmkfstools.