VMWare virtual disk resize

[liquos]

Hi every one:

I am looking how to reduce the size of one of my virtual hard disk running on WMware EXSi 5.1.0, I have found couple of article but it seems they contradict one to each other. The first article: VMware KB: Unable to locate the ISO image for the VMware Tools installation; takes you to the VMware installer tools but ti is for the virtual machine. The second article is how to resize the virtual disk using VMware Tools which according with the article: VMware KB: VMware Tools shrink option on ESXi/ESX hosted virtual machines; they are installed under Control Panel in Windows. I have checked both locations and neither the virtual machine neither VMwareSphere client has installed such tools. The VM was created using P2V but the conversion did not allowed me to reduce the size of the drive. Now I would like to reduced the VM disk to use the empty space in other VM.

Where can I download the tools from? Do I need to SSH into the VMware server and do it from there or it will be done using the clients tools? I am not sure what I have missing.

Any help greatly appreciated.

[a_p_]

VMware Converter offers a "Volume Based" conversion (you need to switch to Advanced Options in the wizard) which - for most operating systems - allows to select the destination disk size.

André

[liquos]

@ a.p.

While this is helpful the machine is already converted to virtual. Now I need to resized the HDD to a smaller size. I don't have the physical machine any longer indicating that this operation cannot be undone at this time or redone. Moving forward, I was looking more for information on how to resize the HDD from its current size to a smaller size.

Thank you.

[a_p_]

The Converter cannot only convert physical systems to virtual machines, it's also able to do V2V, where the source is the current virtual machine. Converting the VM is actually the only supported way to reduce the virtual disk size.

Another option - with thin provisioned virtual disks - is to reduce the guest's partition size, zero out the unused disk space and then reclaim the unused blocks using vmkfstools with the --punchzero option.

André