Just a quick note today, more of a reference than anything else. I had the requirement recently to convert a load of VMs that had thin VMDKs to thick provisioned, however the client was not licensed for live Storage vMotion. In an effort to minimise downtime I decided the best thing to do was use the “Inflate” option in the datastore for that VMDK - this requires the VM to be powered off....
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....