Tuesday, June 02, 2009
Shrinking disks in VMWare
What a pain this is:( The command line utilitly seems to spew out meaningless messages with an attached hex error code, nice and useful that is, not!!!
Reason I came to have to do this today is that I'd installed Windows Server 2008 Standard (x86) in a fresh VM and not knowing how much space it would take I opted to take VM Worktation's (v6.5) suggested disk size of 16gb (pre-allocated). When I'd finished installing I noticed that only 8GB or thereabouts was being used and since I was only going to use this VM as base to clone from to produce some application/web servers it seemed a little excessive to have 8GB free, 2GB seemed like a better number:)
I tried for a couple of hours to shrink the disk down..first I reduced the volume size from within Windows (16GB down to 10GB) and then ran Shrink from VMWare tools....and nothing much happened of any consequence:(
Secondly I tried the command line vmware-vdiskmanager utility with the -x option (and others) and still coudln't get anything to happen (perhaps I'm command line challenged!!).
In the end I downloaded the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone (v4.0.1) . Having installed it I proceeded to select a VMWare VM as the source of the conversion and a VMware VM as the target. The thing that made it all happen was when I chose to convert based on the C: volume (now 10GB) as opposed to the full virtual disk (16GB), the conversion ran faultlessly and now I have a nice Windows 2008 install to clone from.
It amazes me that this method of shrinking the disk, i.e. using the converter, isn't made more obvious which seems a little mad to me since it seems to me that it's a fantastic little tool!
Reason I came to have to do this today is that I'd installed Windows Server 2008 Standard (x86) in a fresh VM and not knowing how much space it would take I opted to take VM Worktation's (v6.5) suggested disk size of 16gb (pre-allocated). When I'd finished installing I noticed that only 8GB or thereabouts was being used and since I was only going to use this VM as base to clone from to produce some application/web servers it seemed a little excessive to have 8GB free, 2GB seemed like a better number:)
I tried for a couple of hours to shrink the disk down..first I reduced the volume size from within Windows (16GB down to 10GB) and then ran Shrink from VMWare tools....and nothing much happened of any consequence:(
Secondly I tried the command line vmware-vdiskmanager utility with the -x option (and others) and still coudln't get anything to happen (perhaps I'm command line challenged!!).
In the end I downloaded the VMware vCenter Converter Standalone (v4.0.1) . Having installed it I proceeded to select a VMWare VM as the source of the conversion and a VMware VM as the target. The thing that made it all happen was when I chose to convert based on the C: volume (now 10GB) as opposed to the full virtual disk (16GB), the conversion ran faultlessly and now I have a nice Windows 2008 install to clone from.
It amazes me that this method of shrinking the disk, i.e. using the converter, isn't made more obvious which seems a little mad to me since it seems to me that it's a fantastic little tool!
Labels: VMWare Converter Workstation
