Shrink Disk in vSphere

[Trojan]

Hi,

 

Does anyone know if I can shrink a disk in vSphere. From what I have read the disk needs to be in independent persistent mode.. can I change the disk mode with no adverse effects to then enable shrinking of the disk from VMware tools on the guest OS.

 

There are no snapshots present.

 

Hope that makes sense.

 

Thanks in advance.

[ChrisMiles]

The truth is you can't. The VMware supported solution is to use VMware Converter to suck the whole VM into a new one with smaller disks:

 

VMware KB: Growing, thinning and shrinking virtual disks for VMware ESX and ESXi

 

If it's just data you could do an offline move to a new disk but thats about it.

[Trojan]

That's unfortunate. Thanks for the quick response though.

[xenonive]

Vmware Convertor is the way to go , just partition it to the smaller size before converting using volume based conversion rather than disk based and export the volume to temp location setting it as a smaller drive size , delete the larger drive from the machine , then move over the smaller drive partition and attach it to the VM with smaller total drive size, downside is you need some downtime when you delete and attach the drive and it can take a while to convert depending how much data is on the source drive, ideally you want to do the whole process while the VM is off. Edited May 3, 2014 by xenonive

[synaesthesia]

I second the above. Converter is an awesome tool and generally far, far quicker too.