Yet another shrink vmdk topic

[waeraas]

Hi all!

I have been reading different HOW-TOs on how to shrink a thin provisioned disk, to free up storage.

I have tried alot of the suggested approaches, but it does not work for me...

THe set up:

ESX 4.1 update 1

EMC Clariion CX4-960 storage.

VM: Win2008

40GB c-disk

600GB d-disk.

c-disk uses 30GB and I do not need to shrink this one.

d-disk used about 250GB but after a huge cleanup now only uses 25GB.

I downloaded sDelete v1.6 and since they have done some changes between 1.5 and 1.6 (changed -c to clean and -z to zero - in 1.5 it was the otherway around) I did a sdelete.exe -c d: which did not work.

I then did a sdelete.exe -c d:\ which started and went all the way through.

It stated as far as I rembember "Zeroing free space" but according to sdelete.exe -? the "-c" should do a cleaning not a zeroing.

Disk grew to 600GB as I was expecting.

I then took a svmotion to another LUN - and the disk was still 600GB

So i did another run with sdelete -z d:\

It completed without any errors.

sVmotion'ed it to another LUN, but disk is still 600GB

It there ANYTHING I am doing wrong, or is there an issue with this on 4.1u1

Thanks in advance

Regards,

Kristian

[waeraas]

Thanks for all the response....:smileyshocked:

After finetuning my communitythread searches, and following jfields suggestions in this thread http://communities.vmware.com/message/1699887 it finally worked.

The solution to this one is remarkably simple once you know it.

It took me 2 solid evenings of Storage vMotion traffic to find the key.

You must copy the VM between 2 datastores with a **different block size**.

Then it works fine, assuming you've done an "sdelete -c C:" first.

If all your datastores have the same block size, you'll have to reformat one of them to a different block size to solve this.

Jules.

So sVmotion from one LUN with 4MB blocksize to a LUN with 8MB blocksize did shrink the disk.

Regards,

Kristian