In my one year and plus experience in VMware, I have been asked a lot from various customers regarding shrinking a VMDK.
Nearly 5 cases in a month I receive are stating, I have given 1 TB of Hard Disk to my virtual machine and now I need to shrink it 500 GB, how do I do this?
Well, the first thing we require is a VMware Converter Standalone.
If you don't have it, well, of course, you need to download one!
VMware vCenter Converter Standalone
1. Install this converter machine, either on to your vCenter machine or a remote machine.
2. Open the Converter and it prompts you to login, if it's on a vCenter Server, you can login as localhost and well, if it's on a remote server, with the remote server IP.
3. And on the top left, click the Convert Machine
4. A window pops up asking for certain details. Here.
- Select Source type: VMware infrastructure Virtual Machine, of course.
- The Server IP.
- It's username and password.
5. This connected the Converter to the vCenter and you can see your vCenter Inventory being listed in this window.
6. Select the VM which you want to shrink and click View Source Details and as the name states the details of the source VM will be populated.
7. Specify a name for the destination virtual machine. This destination machine is the converted/shrunk machine.
8. Select the virtual machine Hardware Version and the Datastore it has to reside on.
9. Now a big window opens up with multiple Options.
- Under Data to copy: Click Edit
- Here we can see two options from the drop down. Copy all disks is like an exact replica of the source VM and Select Volumes to copy can be used to resize the disk.
- Select the capacity and the type of provisioning that has to be done. Thick/Thin as per your requirement (Freedom of choice!)
10. Click Next and review all the changes before we proceed further. Let's at least take a few seconds and read this (Because we sure do not read the license agreements for anything) and upon verification click Finish.
There we go. The virtual machine is converted to a virtual machine but with a resized disk.
Burn those data calories away and slim down your VMDKs!
Thank you.
Suhas G Savkoor