Remove and/or shrink vmdk's.

[tmoffett]

I'm running ESX 4.1.  On one particular host I've got one VM.  It has 3 Thin disks and a 4th Thick disk.  Why it was done this way I don't know.

It was incorrectly configured to begin with because the purpose of the extra drives was to add space to the 2nd drive.  THey could have simply changed the size of disk two and then rescanned the disks in Windows Server 2008, and extended the drives.  They added the drives, rescanned, and then extended E: across three drives.  We've since ran a "shrink" in Windows and now the disk configuration looks like this.

The Datastore Browser shows this.

I need to move this VM to a new host and datastore to repurpose this server.  I can look at how the drives are labeled in the datastore browser and how they are labeled in Windows and make an educated guess on which ones I can remove but I'd like a second opinion.  I'd also like to shrink the 100GB thin drive to a size closer to 60GB.

I do not have an enterprise license to use the enterprise converter.  Any help you can offer would be much appreciated.

[tmoffett]

I'm not sure why the images aren't showing up correctly so I've added them as attachments here.

[weinstein5]

The standalone converter is free and you could use that - since the disks were added last they will be the vmdk files with the _1,_2 and _3 added at the end - I would remove the disks form the OS first and then delete them using the datastore browser - but before you do that confirm that you are removing the right disks by after removing them in the OS powering down the VM and restarting to see chandes in the file dates

[tmoffett]

OK, I've got the last two drives removed from the OS and from VMware.  I've still got a 100GB drive that is partially unallocated.  I've installed the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone Client but when I get to the summary screen it doesn't show any of the two drives C: and E:.  The drives exist, the server is up and running without issue.

Attached are screenshots.

How can I shrink the E: (100GB) down to 60GB?

[a_p_]

I can't give you a solution to the issue, however I'm almost sure the issue you see is caused by the fact that you have "Dynamic" disks. Searching the web shows a couple of issues and hints about converting systems with dynamic disks. Maybe this helps.

André

[mlubinski]

you don't need to use converter to shrink vmdk's. First, make sure you have enough free space (more than you want to shrink). then connect to esx shell, and edit vmdk file (descriptor) of a disk which you want to shrink, change it's RW size to one that matches destination size (like 60GB) and after that, save this file, and perform Storage Vmotion of this VMDK to another datastore, and that's it - it's shrinked.

here complete manual:

http://professionalvmware.com/2009/09/how-to-shrink-a-vmdk-file-in-esx/

I did it multiple times and it works like a charm.