Guess this is a two-parter. Background is we realized that a Diskeeper auto-defrag somehow caused a thin-provisioned disk to expand to the full amount alotted to it on several machines. As one example, a machine with a 200 GB disk was only using 90 GB, and the rest was still free, and after the defrag the VMDK expanded to 200 GB, even though the machine still only has 90 GB of data on it.
1. So the first question is, is this a known issue with Diskeeper? Has anyone else experienced it? And is there a workaround/setting for thin provisioned disks, or are they incompatible?
2. Second question is, is there a way to shrink the vmdk and get that space back? Or, more to the point, is there a way to get that space back without having to turn off the VM? I've seen a bunch of wildly conflicting info in online searches. It seems like using Converter would allow us to do it, but it'd involve turning off the old and turning on the new, which would cause some service interruption. So many other things can be done with the VM still active, it seems like there ought to be a way to fix this, too. Also, because a few large machines expanded overnight, space is at a real premium, and I'm concerned about cloning machines and adding to the storage issues.
We tried a Storage VMotion, thinking that might reset the space being used when it set up the thin provisioning, but it stayed at full size during the transfer. I know there's a "shrink" option in VMware tools, but I don't quite understand it, and it's saying it can't be used on a disk not in persistent mode, which I don't think we want in the first place.
