no able to shrink VM

[jbeunel]

Hello,

I use ESXI 4.1 348481 standard and i have 200 VMs and i'd like to use the shrink function of vmware tools.

When i open vmware tools i go to shrink, there is a message:Shrink disk is disabled for this virtual machine.Shrinking is disabled for virtual disk not used in persistent mode or due to other factors...

I have the problem for all vms, windows 2003 to windows 2008R2 enterprise.

I tried to put disk with mode persistent but it's the same problem.

Some VMs use the controler LSI SAS and other LSI SCSI parallel but same problem....

Can you help me please?

Regards

[jbeunel]

I use thin provisioning, it's why i can't it think 😞

My problem is:

I have 200VMs and each servers use 30% disk in windows but 90% of the disk size in datastores.

I don't want to use converter on each VMS it's to long to resize disk.

i want to see the same disk size in datastore like i see in windows, is it possible?

Regards

[DSTAVERT]

The shrink doesn't do what you hope it will do. Have a look at this http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/docs/vmwdocs/whitepaper-shrinkingvirtualdisks.pdf