How do you shrink your vmdk disk files?

[forbes]

Hi,

I'm just wondering how everyone shrinks their disk files these days. Back in the "good ol' days" we could use the --force switch on vmkfstools to shrink the disk files if we really wanted to. This hidden command has been disabled since around 3.0.1.

How do you guys do it now. The only way I know is to use Converter (or some other p2v tool), but this is overkill just to shrink a disk and can take a very long time.

Does anyone know any new command line kung-foo, or 3rd party tools which can do this?

All tips and tricks from the gurus are much appreciated

Forbes Guthrie

[AWo]

Use VMware Converter to do it (in fact you create a new smaller .vmdk).

http://communities.vmware.com/message/897712#897712

http://communities.vmware.com/message/515964#515964

AWo

[TomHowarth]

seriously the easiest and quickest way is to use VMConverter, I too miss the --force command but to be truthful it caused more issues that it solved especially if you got your geometry wrong

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

[forbes]

Thanks guys, but I was looking for something other than using Converter.

It is certainly not the quickest method, that's the problem. When you could previously force a shrink, it had its problems (and risks), but would only take a second or two. Now, you have to effectively copy the disks. If they are very large disks, this can mean a downtime of hours.

Forbes Guthrie

[wilson94t]

We moved from ESX 2.5.3 to ESX 3.0.1 and made some noise with VMware when we lost the ability to shrink. VMware promised that it would return in a later 3.0.x release and certainly by 3.5. the vmkfstools with force was simple and it worked perfectly, so long as you knew what you were doing. The concept was simple, but I guess VMware had too many support calls beacuse of it.

It's pathetic that just a few idiot users can drive a product to lose functionality. Unix Force options have always suggested "do this even though it might be a bad idea". What a shame that this is what our software has become.

People die in car crashes every day, but that doesn't mean we disallow the use of cars, does it? C'mon... VMware, return vmkfstools --force -X !! Using converter or doing something like : http://www.jack-of-all-trades.org/?p=169 is completly ridiculous by comparison.