How do I shrink a virtual disk?

[JDMils]

I have a virtual server (Win2K8 R2) with a 40GB System drive and 100GB data drive but I want to reduce the data drive to 50GB.

I booted my virtual server using GParted boot DVD, shrunk the disk down to 50GB and confirmed that Windows is OK with the modification, which it is, but VMware console is still showing the data disk as Provisioned = 100GB.

My question is, how do I change the Provisioned value to 50GB to match the disk size?

ESX 4i

[kummi143]

Hi Guys,

i am also facing same issue. Suggestion please?.

Regards

[TomHowarth]

Have a read of the following Blog post on the subject,

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

but be aware that this is not supported. and it is at your own risk.  so before this is done on a production guest. TEST TEST and TEST again,  better still, if you need to reduce the size of the VMDK just do a Conversion of the Guest and select the resize disk option during the configureation stage.  this is Tested, and more importantly SUPPORTED.

the ability to resize VMDKs was removed from VMFSTools in VI3.x because of the number of issues caused by users resizing VMDK's and chopping of data from the end of disks.

[aravinds3107 · Accepted solution]

Suggest to use VMware Converter and reduce the disk size as required during the conversion

[TomHowarth]

For production yes as that is fully supported, but for playing and education/knowledge purposes the blog post is useful

[JDMils]

First I ran gparted to shrink the partition and then I used the VMware converter to do the job properly. Maybe I didn't need to run gParted in the first place?

Unfortunately the process using VMware converted creates a new virtual server with the new disks and you need to then take the ONE newly sized disk and move it into the same folder as the original virtual server then you can delete the destination virtual server folder, then edit the original server's properties to include the new disk. Quite a lot to do just to shrink a volume!

I hope VMware can improve this process in the future!

[antonioredding]

This isn't nearly as bad as it could be.  Why did you need to resize the disk to a smaller size to begin with?  If you start small, it's much easier to make the disk larger in both the guest OS and in the vmdk settings using the vSphere client.