Infrastructure

Introduction Some things should be simple, shrinking a thin provisioned virtual disk should be one of them, it’s not. N.B. This will just reduce the VMDK’s usage on the VMFS datastore NOT resize the “provisioned size” of a thin disk. 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. Windows On Windows guests we can use the sysinternals tool SDelete ↗ (replace the [DRIVE:] with the relevant Windows drive letter) you must use v1....

I have had the need recently to expand a LUN on a Dell MD3000i SAN to above 2TB that is presented to VMWare ESX 5.1 hosts. There are a few caveats here: The VMWare datastore for 2TB+ LUNs must be VMFS-5 as it is now GPT based, not MBR. This can be updated on the fly without shutting down VMs (Configuration -> Storage, Click the Datastore -> “Upgrade to VMFS-5”) Expanding the virtual disks on MD3000i’s can only be done in CLI....