Reduce size of VM virtual disks?

[shannonadams]

I have a VM running on ESX 3.5 that has two 20 GB virtual drives and runs CentOS 5.3. I would like to scale down the total size of the VM from a combined 40 GB to around 10-20 GB. I have a ton of free space on the existing partitions.

Here is my usage:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on

/dev/sdb1 20807184 5767084 13991460 30% /

/dev/sda2 20807216 1135120 18623456 6% /show

/dev/sda1 101086 29351 66516 31% /boot

tmpfs 1948132 0 1948132 0% /dev/shm

How can I reduce these partitions and then the size of the virtual disks?

[kooltechies]

Try using VMware converter that gives you resizing option , there you can select the new size of your disk.

Thanks,

Samir

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[bulletprooffool]

If you're using ESX 3.x, you'll need to use VM Convertor, or something like partition magic . . Convertor will be the neater option.

If you;re using vSphere, you could convert the Disk to be thin provisioned, using the Storga eVMotion tool - this will allow the VMs to think it has 40GB, but only use the amount of disk space that is actually allocated to data

[dkfbp]

I have done something similar.

Created a new .VMDK and used the acronis boot cd to clone from the old .vmdk file to the new .vmdk file.

Best regards

Frank Brix Pedersen

[Gerrit_Lehr · Accepted solution]

I would recommend using the free VMware Converter. It is probably the cleanest and safest way.

Kind Regards,

Gerrit Lehr

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