Shrinking disks with ESX3

[Spiker]

Hi

I notice there is a shrink tab on the VMware tools of the virtual machines in ESX.

I was under the impression that shrinking a disk was an option only for non-preallocated disks - i.e. when using Workstation images that dynamically increase

In ESX as the disks are preallocated - is the shrink function redundant here ?

[esiebert7625 · Accepted solution]

You can no longer do that with ESX3, previously you could with ESX2 using the vmkfstools command. See my site for some other options, VMware Converter is probably the easiest. VMware Tools is pretty much the same across all the VMware products but the Shrink feature will not work with a VM running on ESX because the disk is pre-allocated.

http://www.vmware-land.com/Resizing_Virtual_Disks.html

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Thanks, Eric

Visit my website: http://vmware-land.com

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[Dave_Mishchenko]

As you state, with preallocated disks you won't be able to shrink the disk.

It may still work if you manually created the disk with vmkfstools and used the -d thin option to create "provisioned" disk.

[esiebert7625]

I think you can also clone an existing disk and make it thin by using vmkfstools -i -d thin