Possible to decrease size of thin provisioned disk (even making it thick?)

[KirbyA]

Hi guys,

Is it possible to either 1.) decrease the size of a thin provisioned disk or 2.) convert it to thick whilst also decreasing the size.

(VM was created with an incorrectly sized thin provision of 500gb when the data store it lives on is only 300gb!)

Please Help!

Kirby

[UmeshAhuja]

Hi,

No I dont think so its possible beacuse Thin provisioned  disks can grow to the full size specified at the time of virtual disk  creation, but do not shrink. Once the blocks have been allocated, they cannot be  un-allocated.

[aravinds3107]

Welcome to the commnunity...

Are you saying you have created a data drive (lets say E:) to 500 GB and you want to decrease it to 300 GB and make the disk as Think Provisioned?

if yes,

Option 1 : if you dont have more data on the disk and if you have space on datastore create a new disk of 300GB , use robocopy to copy/move the files to new drive and later delete the drive of 500Gb

Option 2: Use VMware Converter and do Volume based cloning to change the disk size to 300 GB and import it as a new VM (http://www.vmware.com/pdf/convsa_50_guide.pdf)