shrinking an independant disk vmdk for esxi v4.1

[tristanb81]

Hello,

I have client that has an esx server.

Currently they have a 2 virtual servers, one running sbs08.  Attached to this is a rather large independant disk vmdk - 800gb.  This is for stortage.

We would now like to shrink this volume by around 300gb as they would like to then use this space for storgae for another server.

What is the best way to do this and is there any sort of process i can follow?

We do not have enough available space to use the vm converter tool.

Cheers

Tristan

[bilalhashmi]

Take a look at this link...

http://professionalvmware.com/2009/09/how-to-shrink-a-vmdk-file-in-esx/

Basically, you can clone the disk with the new disk being the size that you want it to be.. u can then del the orginal disk and attached the new disk to the VM and reclaim your storgae. I know this link is for ESX, however I think u should be able to get this working for ESXi as well, though I haven't tried this myself. Just be sure not to del the original vmdk until u have confirmed that the shrunk clone is working as expected..

Good luck!

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[idle-jam]

if you have a storage vmotion, you can turn it to thin provision by doing a storage vmotion copy. that is one of the way, another is to export out via vmware converter, delete the actual VM and reimport in with the new resized disk from vmware converter wizard.

[tristanb81]

Unfortunately we do not have vmotion.

We also only have 50gb disk space available in the data store so am not sure if converter will like that, from reading it seems i will need the equivelant free to do the conversion and then delete the orginial . . . ?

Is the vmdk tools an option? i have found various different answers for this.

[idle-jam]

you will need another 100% of it to perform if it's from the same ESXi storage. For your case you will need to use vmware converter would export your VM to a PC. and then once the conversion is done you can re import it back to the ESXi hosts and from the wizard there is an option to resize the disk.