Hard Disk for newvies

[anatanotenshi]

Hi there.

Can you reduce or increase the amount of space designated for a VM's HD without collateral damage?

Thanks.

[kooltechies]

Hi,

Reducing a VM's vmdk is not recomended and this can have adverse affect , but you can safely increase the disk size.

Thanks,

Samir

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[anatanotenshi]

You are not able to do that even defragmenting the HD, so the data is ordered and leaving the free space to cut it?

[kooltechies]

Hi,

If you want to resize or reduce the disk size then a safe option will be to use VMware converter and import it again with resizing option as this will take out the white spaces which are not being used. However the command line option of vmkfstools -X have that logic or not which I am not sure in case of reducing the size as it may take out a valid data block but I am not 100% confident on that point.

Thanks,

Samir

[khughes]

If you wish to reduce the size of the vmdk file then using converter and doing a v2v would probably your best and safest bet. Doing this will not damage your original VM and allow you to test the new VM converter made with smaller drives to see if there were any adverse affects during the disk reduction. I would venture to guess you could do this and see no issues.

• Kyle