Vmware workstation 12 player shrink disk free.How to shrink a thick VMDK disk on a virtual machine

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Click the Shrink tab. Select the drive you want to shrink.
 
 

 

Vmware workstation 12 player shrink disk free –

 

Because I am sort of paranoid, I’d first go with the converter to have another copy of the VM and in the same time with a shrinked disk. If something failes with the VMFS, you’ll have the converted copy. Disregarding what is your configuraiton since you don’t provide any detailed information , convert this VM with VMWare Converter by choosing to shrink the disk to the desired size.

If you don’t want to do that and this is the smoothest way to do it , please provide some info: VMWare Edition and version, Virtual hardware version, type of virtual disk thin, thik, lazy zeroes etc. We are running VMware Essential Plus it’s version 5.

I have around 26 TB of free Space so that is not the problem but the Datastore the server is located on there is GB free space. You MAY be able to shrink it using a partition tool but I’d recommend either a good backup or clone the server first.

The other way to shrink a VM hard drive if it is thick previsioned or if you have enough space for the hard drive to fill all the way out is to use CCleaner and 0 the free space this makes it a thick previsioned disk then MOVE the VM to another data store and change the type to thin previsioned.

This will give you the free space back so you have a smaller VM hard disk. Launch it, choose to convert directly to ESX host or vCenter server, provide it’s location and credentials, choose to shrink the disk of the new virtual machine. There are other settings that you have to set for yourself in the wizard. The converter will upload the new VM to the choosen datastore, then all you need to do is stop the old VM, add the new one to the inventory and power it up. I’ve had success doing this in ESXi 4.

If you’re still on 4. You can use vmfstools –punchzero to re-thin a disk while the machine is powered off. You should sdelete -Z first, though. But I kinda had an idear last night, but to explan it you need to know the reason i need to shrink the disk.

It’s becourse the disk is by mistake a little to big for my Veeam backup to make a snapshot of the VM. I was thinking if I upgrade the datastore to VMFS 5 instead of 3 then the datastore will support bigger files The VMFS 3 datastore i have running is set to GB and the harddrive file is , so just a little to big. It’s good to see so many suggestions in one place.

I’ve never gotten around to shrinking a thin disk, but none of the solutions listed here or elsewhere have ever felt “not hacky” to me. It seems like a common enough issue that vsphere should have a function to get ‘er done right. You have to use VMWare Converter to shrink disk size. You could do storage vMotion between datastores with different block sizes – so no go with VMFS5 – but your version doesn’t even have storage vMotion. It’s sucks big time that VMWare doesn’t have that feature at all, Hyper-V has it out of the box, and it takes two mouse clicks.

It sucks you can’t even convert thick disk to thin in GUI – just to be clear, I prefer terminal, but it’s such a basic feature it should be right there. This topic has been locked by an administrator and is no longer open for commenting. To continue this discussion, please ask a new question. What are some good computer repair type questions to ask a user just starting in the field out of HS.

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Create a new virtual disk of maximum 30GB, add it as a new disk into your current virtual machine, move all data to the new virtual disk using a backup tool.

You may use a live Linux for the cloning. The answer of harrym is pretty good, but it actually does not answer the question. The OP wants to reduce the maximum size. The problem is the hypervisor does not know how much of the presented size aka maximum size is indeed used by the OS.

The compaction vmware-vdiskmakager -k applies to a growable vmdk. It does nothing on preallocated one’s. The first step involves a procedure from within the VM and varies with guest OS. The second step could be supported by the vmware commands but I haven’t found a profound way of doing so. Thus the hacky approach.

Here is a non so quick due to large data moving involved and dirty solution that did the trick. We will need to have available space equal to the maximum device size. Find a way to resize the guest partition and leave unallocated space at the end of the device.

Two examples:. Make sure you add at least this number to the disk size. Now we need convert the bytes to sectors dividing by and rounding upwards ceiling. Note this number for step 3. As the hack works on single file preallocated type 2 vmdks haven’t tried on multiple file types we first convert the growable to preallocated. We will temporarily need a partition with physical space as the maximum size of the device. Open the first disk. Find the line. Yes you get the point, the second field is the number of sectors allocated for the device.

This should be the previous device’s size. Now replace that number with the noted number from step one and save the file.

But we resized the fs on the beginning of the device and made correct and safe calculations right? Until now no data have been touched yet. Do this final step to actually trim the extends. We will use the rename functionality of vmware-vdiskmanager to recreate the vmdk with it’s size now trimmed. You’ll have to set the sum of all partitions to be less than 30GB. You’ll have to shrink the sizes of the partitions down as you go. Why did you create a GB thin partition if you did not have the space to support it at maximum size?

Seems like this is just asking for trouble. Detailed steps here. Note that any changes to the VMDK size will also need a corresponding update to the partition table. In a Windows virtual machine, you must first run a disk defragment from within Windows. Defragmenting within Windows ensures that all of the used spaces are contiguous. You can then reduce the size of the virtual disk.

Note: In Workstation 9. Therefore, this option is removed from VMware Tools Panel. This is not available in Linux version of VMware Workstation 9.

Click the Shrink tab. Select the drive you want to shrink. Click Prepare to Shrink, then follow the onscreen instructions. Caution: Do not shut down your virtual machine or the host machine while the disk is shrinking. Also, do not try to cancel the process. Interrupting this process can cause irreparable damage to your virtual disk and you may not be able to start your virtual machine again.

Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Start collaborating and sharing organizational knowledge. Create a free Team Why Teams? Learn more. VMware Workstation: how to reduce. Asked 8 years, 11 months ago. Modified 4 years, 7 months ago. Viewed 81k times. I have a GB disk file. Creating a new blank virtual machine of the desired size in order to copy the 20GB data onto the new.

Looking in the. Is there a solution at all? Improve this question. Hennes Add a comment. Sorted by: Reset to default. Highest score default Date modified newest first Date created oldest first. The usual procedure for reducing the size of a. This can be done using vmware-vdiskmanager with the -t parameter whose values are: 0 : single growable virtual disk 1 : growable virtual disk split in 2Gb files 2 : single preallocated virtual disk 3 : preallocated virtual disk split in 2Gb files The following command will convert the.

Improve this answer. DanielB: No, it doesn’t reduce the maximal size, just the physical size. Reducing the maximal size can be dangerous, as some OS cannot boot without some free space on the system disk. However, this does not completely solve my problem, as if I want to keep the VMDK always under, let’s say 30GB, I will have to periodically repeat the operation which takes a long time indeed.

If the disk can always be slimmed down to the wanted size, meaning that the procedure above always works to reduce the size, then you could limit the size in the future by converting the disk to fixed-size. Show 5 more comments. Recommended option is A. Excellll So the steps to shrink the disk are: Resize the partition on disk via the OS, or via a suitable live CD Resize the vmdk device, carefully choosing the boundary not to cut any usable partition space.

 
 

virtual machine – VMware Workstation: how to reduce .vmdk maximum size – Super User

 
 

This makes it easier to manage the empty VMDK extents later, and you can always expand the volume back out to the end of the drive at the end of the process. Now that we have a disk setup that looks like the below, we can crack on with altering the VMDK itself.

Note the If your VMDK was a single file to begin with, then the process of zeroing the empty space and splitting the disk should have resulted in a compact set of VMDK extents where all the data is in the earlier extents and the last few extent files are empty.

If your extents look a bit like the below image, then you are good to go. So this process is really only necessary if your original VMDK was already split into multiple files when you started though it will do no harm if you do it anyway. After the shrinking process, the last 4 of my extent files are empty as they are at the standard KB or smaller. The last extent is at KB as its just making up the difference required to the bring the total size of the extents to exactly 60GB.

You have a few choices at this point, depending on how the original VM was configured and how you want it to be long term split disk vs single file.

In my case I am going to option 2 as I started with a single disk, and want to continue with one. Options 1 and 3 are straight forward. Assuming you now have the correct files in the VM folder, and have modified the VM settings if necessary , check the settings of the hard disk and see what size it reports. In my case it now says 50GB instead of the original 60GB. Like Like. This works. You are commenting using your WordPress.

You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Blog at WordPress. Fusion Interface So this is where you go to extend a virtual disk. Share this: Twitter Facebook. Click it to continue.

If these are using a lot of space according to the disk usage information here, you can delete snapshots to free up space if you no longer need them. In VMware Workstation, first power off the virtual machine you want to compact. These can take a lot of space if the virtual machine has changed significantly since then.

You can free up additional space by deleting snapshots you no longer need. Naturally, after removing the snapshot, you will be unable to restore your virtual machine to that previous point in time. You must be logged in to post a comment. Don’t have an account? Related Articles. Best Free Website Builder for Chiropractors 2 days ago. Show More. Subscribe to our mailing list to get the new updates! Enter your Email address. Leave a Reply. Leave a Reply Cancel reply You must be logged in to post a comment.