We got a request to reduce the allocated size of thick provisioned virtual machines hard disk. The storage browser displays both, the actual size and the provisioned size. Esxi and array thin provisioning you can use thinprovisioned storage arrays with esxi. Reclaiming thin provisioned storage space with vmware. If youve thinprovisioned a vmdk under esxi and need to reduce it for whatever reason, the official vmware documentation suggest to migrate the vm to another datastore using vmware converter which is not always practical, thankfully an alternative exists. The disk has not been touched yet, so the size is displayed with 0 kb. On windows guests we can use the sysinternals tool sdelete replace the drive. The disk was originally thick provisioned, so i restored the disk to another server using veeam and changed the disk type to. We have a storage challenge in our organization, and i intend to reduce the storage space assigned to the vm. Historically this was done with scsi reservations, and could cause some performance related issues if a lot of thinly provisioned vms were growing.
Changing thick or thin provisioning for vmdk vmware hdd. Just trying to shrink an already thin provisioned windows xp vm which is using only 10gb of a 127gb c. There is an emphasis on web application security but many other topics are covers. Download sdelete onto the vm you want to shrink and run the following. Here is a look at the provisioned and used space from a vmdk perspective. The answer to shrink a thin vmdk is, after using sdelete app, to use vmotion to move or copy your vms, or if you dont have vmotion, to use converter standalone to do the convert your vms. How can you expand or shrink an existing virtual disk vmdk in esxiesx. Shrinking a thin provisioned vmdk on a datastore with. Normally, this would clear all unused disk space, but strangely this doesnt work for thinprovisioned disk. To shrink a vmdk we can use an esx command line tool vmkfstools, but first you. After reimporting the vm from the previously exported. Reclaiming disk space with storage vmotion and thin provisioning ive seen a number of posts on the vmtn forums as well as had discussions with folks regarding reclaiming disk space with storage vmotion so i thought it made sense to do a quick writeup on how this process works. The command helps thinprovisioned storage arrays to reclaim unused space from the.
It will continue to occupy the maximum space it have ever used after creation. To convert a thick provisioned hard disk to thin using command line console. Will thinprovisioned vms shrink automatically just as they would grow automatically. Login to the virtual machine and shrink the os partition before we can shrink the vmware virtual machine disk vmdk, we need to shrink the os partition. Using sdelete and vmkfstools to reclaim thin vmdk space. Increasing the vmdk size can be done in gui but decreasing the size of vmdk is not allowed. Reclaim disk space from thin provisioned vmdk files in esxi server. The only way to actually reduce them is vmware convertor and v2v them, you cannot shrink a partition and give the space back any other way 1. I have a vm assigned about 2tb thin provisioned of disk space and it utilizes just about 300gb.
One of the issue with vmdk in thin format is that they start small and then grow when you add new data but when you delete some data, the vmdk file size is not reduced. Before we can use vmkfstools to shrink the vmdk file we must zero out any unused space on the thin provisioned disk. This is for esxifree, so vcenter is not available, no vmotion, no storage vmotion. Reclaiming disk space with storage vmotion and thin. In most cases, for virtual machine hard disk shrink can be performed via v2v. The size we are taking of vmware virtual machine disk vmdk, in this example, is 50gb, and we will shrink the size to 25 gb. Using sdelete and vmkfstools to reclaim thin vmdk space using thin provisioned virtual disks can provide many benefits. Over time virtual machine guests will grow in size if provisioned as a thin disk due to files being copied or log files being generated, once the files are unallocated deleted or moved the vmdk still reserves the location as.
Once registered, you can download the ova and deploy to your. The disk management utility scans all the file system, that is available and reports a maximum size the os partition that can be reduced, this is based on current file system usage. Vmware vmdk shrink and storage thin provisioning 101. How can i reduce thin provisioned allocation of vmdk that. If you delete files from within the vm wanting to gain the space back, it just dont work. I have shrunk the space on the server itself windows, but vsphere does not allow reducing the size of disk assigned to a vm. How to shrink a thin provisioned virtual disk vmdk. So as alex pointed out, a thick provisioned file would be the result. When i look at the drive through the datastore browser it tells me the actual size is 7 gb and the provisioned size is 40 gb. To shrink a vmdk we can use an esx command line tool vmkfstools, but first you have to zero out any free space on your thin provisioned disk.
When we use thin provisioned vmdk, the size of the vmdk expands as we pile up data in the os. Vaai thin provisioning block reclaimunmap in action. A simple way of doing this is by using a free utility called sdelete from sysinternals. How to shrink vmdk file of vm in vsphere virtualization blog. So i wanted to shrink my vmdk size as much as possible. Let me begin with saying that if the disk in question is already thin provisioned, then you dont have to do anything else then shut down the vm and edit the hard disk properties to. Power off the virtual machine, or disconnect the virtual disk you want to shrink. In my case it was 8gb disk assigned and hence the value was 83886080. Howto convert a vmdk from thick to thin provisioning on.
Single point of control to provision and apply policies to all of your. How to shrink a thin provisioned virtual disk vmdk thin provisioned disks are a great feature to save capacity as you virtual machines filesystem will never use the full capacity. Now sdelete has finished, we need to run vmkfstools on the datastore to shrink the thin provisioned vmdk back down to size. Vmware esxi doesnt know that the guest has marked blocks as free. Ssh into the esxi host and cd into the directory in which your virtual machine resides.
Thin provisioned disk shows 0kb size on the datastore even though it is a 40 gig disk the vmfs unmap operations inform the storage array that the blocks that it still has allocated as being in use are now able to be unmapped and the space reclaimed. I dont have vmotion on my vsphere i use the simple vsphre client, so i tried the second solution with converter standalone, and it worked. Esxi and array thin provisioning you can use thin provisioned storage arrays with esxi. Vmware esx 4 reclaiming thin provisioned disk unused space. Thinprovisioned virtual disks are quick to create and useful for saving storage space. This video shows perfectstorage running a reclaim operation in an esxhosted windows server 2008 guest in order to shrink a thinprovisioned vmdk.
The only supported method of shrinking a vmware virtual machine disk vmdk is to use vmware vcenter converter standalone and create a virtual to virtual v2v conversion, a similar process to a physical to virtual p2v conversion. Ive managed to holepunch a thin provisioned drive before after zeroing the free space. Option 1 migrate the vm guest to another datastore and change the advanced configuration of the hard drive to thin provisioned. The method of changing disk provisioning type using cli involves copying current vmdk file to a new thin provisioned disk and removing old thick disk. Shrink a vmware virtual machine disk vmdk from my technical experience in vmware world, i have met a lot of customers which asking me to shrink the size of a. Thin an existing large virtual disk so it consumes less datastore space, without actually shrinking the virtual disk. Shrinking a thick provisioned disk in vmware esxi 5. You can observe a similar behavior in case of vmfs and underlying thinprovisioned luns. When a lun is thinprovisioned, the storage array reports the luns logical size, which might be larger than the real physical capacity backing that lun. Since i see that a lot of people wonder how to do this, i thought id share with you. But if we delete some data from os, the reclaimed space in the os will not be reclaimed from the vmdk. To do this the virtual machine needs to be powered off.
Growing, thinning, and shrinking virtual disks for vmware esx and. After cleaning up the vm itself and running sdelete, its time to shrink the vmdk. This article gives the steps to convert a thick provisioned virtual hard drive vmdk to thin provisioned on esx 4 or newer. To connect to the esxi host cli over ssh, you have to enable ssh service in the esxi settings and allow incoming connection on tcp22 port manage.
To work around this issue, perform these operation on the thinprovisioned or thick lazyzeroed disk. Posted by mohammed raffic on last updated dec 22, 2014 at 7. Edit settings in your vm and attach the new disk you just made and remove the originalbut dont delete it after seeing that. Vmware advanced vmdk size reclamation for thinprovisioned. The command helps thin provisioned storage arrays to reclaim unused space from the. Using the vmtools shrink option in a windows vm with vmware tools running, you can rightclick the vmtools icon and select open vmware tools. This commandline tool has a powerful feature which can track and zero unused blocks.
Reclaim disk space from thin provisioned vmdk files in esx dec 12 2014 by lunarg at black manticore. I tried to run defrag, sdelete and then shutdown the vm and vmotion to another datastore with a target disk format of thin provisioned but this failed to reclaim the free space from the vm. I am wanting to shrink a drive from 200 gb capacity down to 100 gb. Make a clone of the vmdk that is set to only read and write to a different size. Identify disk usage of a thin provisioned virtual disk. Vmware admins also need to keep an eye on capacity alerts, because thinprovisioned vms grow over time. I do not know a single system where you do not have at least 10gb of free space for os disks. How to reclaim size of a thin provisioned vmdk file in. Could someone explain or point out a tutorial on moving a thinprovisioned vmdk from the datastore on one server to the datastore on another. Shrink a vmware virtual machine disk vmdk virtualman. Reduce vmdk size the easiest method is to use vmware converter standalone to shrink vmdk disk files. Reallythis is a mission critical task, but let us go through this procedure to show up how to do this. The reason for this is that i often need to download the vm to usb storage of whatever and. Not only do they allow overprovisioning, but with the prevalence of flash storage, performance degradation really isnt a concern like it used to be.
If a vmdk is removed from a vmfs datastore, the underlying thinprovisioned lun doesnt show more free space. Some things should be simple, shrinking a thin provisioned virtual disk should be one of them, its not. To be honest this issue is more related to the guest file systems that does never delete the block data, but only the metada or some of them. The webpwnized youtube channel is dedicated to information security, security testing and ethical hacking. It is however possible to shrink the vmdk back down to the actual size of data that is being used. I have shrunk the volume within the vm to 250gb and have the rest as unallocated space. We will learn how to do it without vmware converter as when using. This will just reduce the vmdk s usage on the vmfs datastore not resize the provisioned size of a thin disk. While thin provisioning adds storage as needed, it does not work in reverse, removing unneeded storage for the vm. If you just download the disk using vsphere client or the. When you work with a thin disk provisionned vm, you are copying new files into a vm, then deleting them, again and again, this process grow the thin disks over time. Shrinking thinprovisioned esxi disks miscellaneous.
If the vmdk is provisioned as thin, then each time the vmdk grows new blocks added, the vmfs datastore would have to be locked so that its metadata could be updated with the new size information. Open a ssh connection to the esxi host and navigate to the virtual machine folder. Would it be possible to shrink the disk first in windows down to 100gb then shrink the vmdk to 100gb also. A vmfs datastore that you deploy on the thinprovisioned lun can detect only the logical size of the lun. In this example when cloning it will stop at 50% during the clone because our new vmdk is half the size of the original. Download sdelete onto the vm you want to shrink and run the following command, replacing drive. Howto shrink a thin provisioned virtual disk vmdk posted by fgrehl on november 24, 2014 leave a comment 25 go to comments thin provisioned disks are a great feature to save capacity as you virtual machines filesystem will never use the full capacity. I want to reduce the vmdk by 2 gb so after the shrink vmdk size should be 6gb. When a virtual machine is powered on, you shrink its virtual disks from the vmware tools control panel. For example, if you create a new thinprovisioned 30gb virtual disk and copy 10 gb of files to it, the size of the resulting vmdk file will be 10 gb, whereas you would have a 30gb vmdk file if you had chosen to use a thickprovisioned disk. Locate your the name of the vmdk you want to shrink. Shrink windows server 2008 r2 vm disk and shrink vmdk. Reclaiming unused vmdk space with storage thin provisioning.
Zero free space using sdelete to shrink thin provisioned vmdk. However, although there is a down arrow present, you cannot shrink the disk in this way, its not supported. Shrink a vmdk virtualbox disk image stack overflow. How to reclaim disk space while using thin provision in esxi 5. In this example i am using windows 2008 r2, which has a shrink function. To look at more granular information about the amount of space consumed on the vmfs5.
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