How to Shrink VMDK Files

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How to Shrink VMDK Files – This is a place for the community to provide tips and advice on How to Shrink VMDK Files. This topic was created by Christophe Auguet and the tips are provided by the community. The tips you add here can be your own or referred from another site. The best tips are then ranked at the top when up-voted by members of the community.

Tip 1 - VMware KB: Growing, thinning and shrinking virtual disks for VMware ESX and ESXi (1002019)

Published: 9 years, 3 month(s) ago | Submitted by Shawn Eckert | permalink

The VMware Knowledge Base provides support solutions, error messages, and troubleshooting guides

For further reading: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1002019 ^[1]

Tip 2 - VMware KB: Defragmenting and shrinking VMware Workstation virtual machine disks (2019649)

Published: 9 years, 3 month(s) ago | Submitted by Chris Bostrom | permalink

The VMware Knowledge Base provides support solutions, error messages, and troubleshooting guides

For further reading: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2019649 ^[2]

Tip 3 - HOW TO: Shrink a VMware Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) in 15 minutes

Published: 9 years, 3 month(s) ago | Submitted by Nancy Connell | permalink

HOW TO: Shrink a VMware Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) in 15 minutes In my previous Experts Exchange Articles, most have featured Basic and Intermediate VMware and Virtualisation Topics. If you would...
Tags: Virtual Machine Disk, VMDK, V2V, VMware vSphere, Shrink, Disk, VHD, ESXi, ESX, VMware

For further reading: http://www.experts-exchange.com/articles/12938/HOW-TO-Shrink-a-VMware-Virtual-Machine-Disk-VMDK-in-15-minutes.html ^[3]

Tip 4 - Howto Shrink a Thin Provisioned Virtual Disk (VMDK)

Published: 9 years, 3 month(s) ago | Submitted by voula forligas | permalink

Thin provisioned disks are a great feature to save capacity as you virtual machines filesystem will never use the full capacity. I do not know a single system where you do not have at least 10GB of...
Tags: esxi,howto,troubleshooting

For further reading: https://www.virten.net/2014/11/howto-shrink-a-thin-provisioned-virtual-disk-vmdk/ ^[4]

Tip 5 - How To Shrink VMware Virtual Disk Files (.vmdk)

Published: 9 years, 3 month(s) ago | Submitted by NORMAN YOPP | permalink

How To Shrink VMware Virtual Disk Files (.vmdk) This guide shows how you can shrink the virtual disk files (they have the extension .vmdk) of your...
Tags: virtualization,vmware

For further reading: https://www.howtoforge.com/how-to-shrink-vmware-virtual-disk-files-vmdk ^[5]

Tip 6 - VMware VMDK shrink and storage thin provisioning 101

Published: 9 years, 3 month(s) ago | Submitted by Vibeke Brinck | permalink

Get answers about VMDK shrink and storage thin provisioning to keep storage requirements at bay in VMware virtualized environments. Learn three VMDK shrink methods.

For further reading: http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/feature/VMware-VMDK-shrink-and-storage-thin-provisioning-101 ^[6]

Tip 7 - VMware Workstation: how to reduce .vmdk maximum size

Published: 9 years, 3 month(s) ago | Submitted by Kris Vloeberghs | permalink

I have a 150 GB disk file (.vmdk, non pre-allocated) where my virtual machine is stored. The file is currently 20 GB, but it is growing everyday, even though I'm not storing anything new in the gu...

For further reading: http://superuser.com/questions/611955/vmware-workstation-how-to-reduce-vmdk-maximum-size ^[7]

Tip 8 - How-to Reduce VMDK size: VMware Converter - ESX Virtualization

Published: 9 years, 3 month(s) ago | Submitted by cyb 3rdragon | permalink

Reduce VMDK size - the easiest method is to use VMware converter standalone to shrink VMDK disk files. How to use VMware converter to make VMDK smaller

For further reading: http://www.vladan.fr/reduce-vmdk-size/ ^[8]