Cloning a VM to reclaim disk space

[MariusRoma]

I noticed that if I clone a Windows VM usually I have to re-activate it.

I noticed as well that cloning a VM is a nice way to reclaim disk space by shrinking thin disks.

Is there any way to clone a VM making it as identical as possible to the original VM, so that reactivating Windows is not required?

Obviously, as cloning is performed only to reclain disk space, after creating the clone the original VM is deleted.

Regards

marius

[JCMorrissey]

Hi Marius,

Take a look at the suggestion in the thread below to see if that helps

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/306126?start=0&tstart=0

Many tx

[MariusRoma]

Thank you for the pointer.

My problem is slightly different: reactivating Windows is not a problem, rather than ensuring that the clone is as similar as possible to the original VM and that installed applications are not affected.

Given I clone the VM only to reclain space, I need to be sure that nothing changes...

Regards

marius

[weinstein5]

Cold migrating the VM to another datastore should also reclaim the space -

[rurffy]

Easiest way to do this is to browse to your Datastore, create a new folder - call it anything you like . Now go into your vm you want to clone. copy all the files in that vm folder to the new folder you created. Now you can add the vmx file to inventory and viola!!!! You wll have exactly same thing. You must power of the original vm afterwards or delete it. 

[taylorb]

weinstein5 wrote:

Cold migrating the VM to another datastore should also reclaim the space -

It doesn't have to be a cold migration, storage vmotion would let you do it without any downtime, presuming the host running the VM has access to both datastores.

[rhaslund]

You could use a combination of the free Microsoft utility called sdelete and as previously suggested either Storage vMotion or Enhanced vMotion.

Download: SDelete