Have a server running that is 400GB allocated in ESXi for the drive. We can shrink the drive size down to 300GB within Windows Server not a problem. However how would you shrink the file size for the VM to the 300GB? Only allows the same size or larger in the settings.
Shrinking a disk from a VM is possible but only by editing the vmdk file. Imho not worth the hassle. I would connect a second smaller disk and copy the content.
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As it was said before, of shrinking the disk you can use converter or edit the VMDK. but if it is a storage allocation issue you are looking into, you can storage vmotion the VM into another datastore and change the provisioning to thin
