reduce vmdk size on vmware not working

[sibsbt]

i created 50 GB vmdk

I just want to shrink to 25 GB

I shrink on OS level

But i cant shrink on vmware

If i reduce to 25 GB on vmware it is retaining to 50 GB

How can i do that

[Virtualinfra]

You have to use vmware standalone convertor which is a free tool, so that you can perform v2v and shrink the disk size to 25 Gb or as required.when converting. its can be performed as a hot convertion and once the machine is confirgure, shutdown the 50GB machine and power on the 25 Gb machine.This is the best way.

You can download vmware convertor from the below link

http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/converter5/dHclYnRqZEBiZEAldw==

User guide

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/convsa_50_guide.pdf

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[arturka]

Hi

Disk on VM is THICK provisioned, if you wanna easly shrink it you should provision VMs with THIN disks. You have 3 workarounds:

1. Do storage vMotion and convert disk from THICK to THIN (can be done on the fly)
2. Use VMware converter and change disk size to 25GB and disk format from THICK to THIN - In thin format is much easier to manipulate disk size but be very careful with THIN disks cause you can easly overprovision datastore ( you can assign more storage to VMs then datastore size)
3. Use VMware converter and change size for particular disk (disks will reamin THICK provisioned)

Cheers
Artur

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