How to decrease windows 10 VM disk size in vCenter 7?

[hamidsattarrana]

Hello All!

I have a Windows 10 virtual machine. I assigned it 1.5 TB storage but now I want to decrease it. I only need 200 GB. I shrink the volume inside the Windows 10 VM. And 1TB is unallocated inside Windows VM. I powered it off but when I tried to decrease the storage it gave a warning "Enter the capacity which is larger than its original capacity".

The disk type is: Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed

vCenter version is 7.

Does anyone know if it is possible? if yes can you tell me how can I do that?

Thanks in advance.

[a_p_]

There's no supported way to decrease the size of a virtual disk.
Anyway, you can use VMware Converter to convert (clone) the VM to a new one with the desired size.

André

[Brisk · Accepted solution]

While there is no supported way to shrink your disk size in vSphere. You can achieve the same result by converting your disk to thin provisioned.

To do this, perform a storage vMotion of your VM and change the disk type from thick lazy to thin provisioning. This will take some time, but you will end up with a disk that is still 1,5 TB in allocated size but will only be as big as it needs to be on your storage.

That being said, since this is an already existing machine, you will probably end up with slightly higher storage utilization than what is needed, but still well under 1.5 TB.