Convert thick to thin disk w/o removing snapshots

[freaky2000]

Hey there,

we want to convert some thick disks to thin (vmware workstation 5.5). Found some documents on this but those claim this can't be done whilst snapshots exist.

However, I used the vmware-vdiskmanager on the latest snapshot .vmdk and it appears to work fine (copied the resulting disk image to another machine running vmware workstation 5.5, created a new virtual machine using that disk and starts fine, appearantly containing all data including latest snapshot).

Should I be worried?

Did it like so:

vmware-vdiskmanager -r image-name-0000003.vmdk -t 0 destination.vmdk

[KevinG · Accepted solution]

Hi there,

Since the image-name-0000003.vmdk contains a reference to the base virtual disk, basically what you have done is used the vmware-vdiskmanger to read the data from both the snapshot and the base virtual disk and created a new virtual disk of type growable.

Should you be worried...not is this case.

If you had used vmware-vdiskmanager to expand a base virtual disk and it had a snapshot, there would be problems in that case.

[freaky2000]

Yea I figured that cause I saw the references in the .vmdk. Kinda strange tho' since 000001 is actually the latest snapshot whilst there's a 000002 :D.

Anyways was just curious as to why the manual says otherwise then, perhaps it was an old one.

[KevinG]

Actually if you had done the following

vmware-vdiskmanger -r mybase.vmdk -t 0 mynew.vmdk

and the "mybase.vmdk" had a snapshot, then you would be in trouble and lose the snapshot data.

What you did, using the snapshot is not even in the manual.

It's what they call a undocumented feature

[freaky2000]

Ah, so I should be getting a bonus? :smileygrin:

Thanks for the help.