shrink disk // space added to wrong windows disk

[HankVonHelvete]

Hi,

My local Windows admin asked for adddtional disk space to grow a drive on a 2008r2 file server

Unfortunately, the wrong disk was grown, and we'd like to get the space back to put it onto the right drive.

I understand that using the converter tool is the best practice, however, i've never used this tool in the past. Our infrastructre is running on 4.1.0 260247

Can the converter tool connect directly to my blade ? How does the converter tool access the VM i need to modify?

[HankVonHelvete]

i've been able to connect,. but if I understand properly, in order to shrink a disk I need to make an entire copy of the full VM back to my production environmnent? how does this make sense?

[DSTAVERT]

If it is just a data disk and just files you could create a new VMDK and then use something like robocopy to move the data to the new disk. Once moved just remove the old disk and change drive letters. You may have access to other tools to clone the files or disk from within the OS.

[marvinms]

The Convert process is a V2V.

During the copy you will be able to resize each volume. Once you are done, you can delete the old VM.

[AureusStone]

Yeah so your options are V2V, new disk then robocopy or thin provision the disk.

A tip for future if you go in to disk manager and right click on the disk you want to expand, eg disk 0, disk 1 etc, and go to properties you can find the SCSI ID that matches the ID in vCenter.

[HankVonHelvete]

thanks for the feedback

the problem I have right now is not enough space available to make an entire copy of the virtual machine.

We are actually considering deleting the disk, creating a new one with the right space and doing a restore of the data from our disk stagging backup

[kjb007]

If you don't have the space, then that will have to be your option.  There is no facility available to shrink a disk, only to expand.  So, once you've increased the space, it's for keeps.

-KjB

[cprawitz]

I just used the converter on 2 2008 Server R2 with No Problems at all. I did not event change the name or configuration of the machines. One of the machines was my vCenter Server. See my post here about what I did: http://communities.vmware.com/people/cprawitz/blog

You best bet mate is to run the converter.

As far as your space, run the converter tool to you local workstation, This will download and resize the machine and store on your local work station for use with VM Workstation 7 or 8. Once you have deleted the machine from the server, run the converter again from your local workstation to the server and this will put the machine back on the server. Might as well give it a shot, your gonna delete the source machine anyways.