Replace thick vmdk with thin

[miketrachtenber]

I used the vCenter converter to bring a Hyper-V VM into our cluster. This is my first time using the converter, and though it went better than I anticipated, I'm now getting a "Thick-provisioned VMs on vSAN" alarm; apparently, there is a setting for thin-provisioned in the converter that I overlooked.

After reading the documentation, I was able to clone the vmdk to a thin one with vmkfstools.

My question now is how do I replace the VM's existing hard drive with the new one? Thanks.

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

Assuming that you've used vmkfstools with the additional "-W vsan" option, the converted virtual disk should be a vSAN object with its descriptor .vmdk file in the command's target folder.

You can now either modify the VM's settings from the UI (i.e. remove the thick virtual disk, and add the converted one by selecting the descriptor file), or by editing the VM's configuration (.vmx) file directly, in which case you need to reload the VM to make ESXi reread the configuration (see e.g. https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1026043).

André