VMWare ESXi shrink thin or thin provisioned disk

If you’re like me, that is with a very limited cash availability to invest in hardware, you will most likely run out of space pretty fast once you start converting all those virtual machines you got on the desktop to your newly installed ESXi.
Now, you will immediately think, what happened to my thin provisioned disks that made them grow like that? You can google for the answer but let me tell you a better solution than what you will find on the net, which are:
– convert the virtual machine
– use some cdelete or whatever its name is to free up space
– maybe other things that are not as cool

The cool idea is that you can create a new disk, about the size that you need, and copy over the data to the new disk then delete the old one. Either use dd in linkux or whatever diskcopy you can find for windows (easeus has a few solutions) or use a system backup something that will pack up your files and then restore on the new disk.
This beats converting V2V as the hardware will not change.

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2 Responses to “VMWare ESXi shrink thin or thin provisioned disk”

  1. Private Cloud says:

    I’m not sure where you are getting your info, but good topic. I needs to spend some time learning more or understanding more. Thanks for fantastic information I was looking for this information for my mission.

  2. ciuly says:

    Not to mention speed. I just wanted to do a V2V conversion to reduce a 25 GB disk to 15 GB, ssd to ssd, estimated time was 8 hours. After like 5 minutes, it was 7 hours and 55 minutes, 3% completed. Definitely sloooow.

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