vmware-vdiskmanager -c -t 0 -s 40GB -a ide myDisk.vmdk
In p2v_thirdpartyimage.pdf
This technical note describes how to create virtual disks, with or without operating systems, using third party tools, compatible with VMware virtual machines.
This technical note contains the following sections:
Using Ghost 2003 Image Files on page 1
Using Bart's Network Boot Disk on page 3
To create a new virtual disk, use a command like the following:
vmware-vdiskmanager -c -t 0 -s 40GB -a ide myDisk.vmdk
This creates a 40GB IDE virtual disk named myDisk.vmdk. The virtual disk is contained in a single .vmdk file. The disk space is not preallocated.
To convert a virtual disk from preallocated to growable, use a command like the following:
vmware-vdiskmanager -r sourceDisk.vmdk -t 0 targetDisk.vmdk
This converts the disk from its original preallocated type to a growable virtual disk consisting of a single virtual disk file. The virtual disk space is no longer preallocated, and the virtual disk manager reclaims some disk space in the virtual disk so it is only as large as the data contained within it.
To expand the size of a virtual disk, use a command like the following:
vmware-vdiskmanager -x 40GB myDisk.vmdk
This increases the maximum capacity of the virtual disk to 40GB.
Renaming a Virtual Disk
Defragmenting a Virtual Disk
Preparing a Virtual Disk for Shrinking
Shrinking a Virtual Disk
documented on: 2006.12.11
On a Windows host, you can use the virtual disk manager to prepare and shrink virtual disks.
You cannot use the virtual disk manager to prepare or shrink virtual disks located on a Linux host.
You cannot use the virtual disk manager to shrink physical disks.
If you have a virtual disk that grows as data is added, you can shrink it as described in this section.
Shrinking a virtual disk reclaims unused space in the virtual disk. If there is empty space in the disk, this process reduces the amount of space the virtual disk occupies on the host drive.
The maximum benefit occurs when you defragment a virtual disk before you shrink it.
Shrinking a disk is a two-step process:
In the first step, called wiping, VMware Tools reclaims all unused portions of disk partitions (such as deleted files) and prepares them for shrinking. Wiping takes place in the guest operating system.
The second step is the shrinking process itself, which takes place on the host. Workstation reduces the size of the disk's files by the amount of disk space reclaimed in the wipe process.
When a virtual machine is powered on, you shrink its virtual disks from the VMware Tools control panel.
Launch the control panel.
Windows guest — double-click the VMware Tools icon in the system tray, or choose Start > Settings > Control Panel, then double-click VMware Tools.
Linux or FreeBSD guest — become root (su -), then run vmware-toolbox.
Click the Shrink tab.
Select the virtual disks you want to shrink, then click Prepare to Shrink A dialog box tracks the progress of the wiping process.
Click Yes when VMware Tools finishes wiping the selected disk partitions. A dialog box tracks the progress of the shrinking process. Shrinking disks may take considerable time.
Click OK to finish.
After playing around with different VMware Appliances and VMware Server, I noticed that the disk space consumed by the virtual machines were rapidly increasing. It's a well known fact that when a vmdk is defined you set a max disk size, and you can chose not to allocate all the disk space at once, and it'll expand the virtual disk as needed when you run the VM. All thats fine and dandy, and it helps keeping the filesize of distributed VMs low. But, what happens when you fill a virtual disk and then delete files from it again? Does the virtual disk shrink in size? No, it doesn't.
There is a perfectly logical explanation to that, as explained by rtfm-ed.co.uk
Well, when Windows deletes a file, it doesn't actually delete the data in the disk; it just deletes the references/pointers in the file allocation table. So when ESX is exporting a VMDK and is looking at the raw disk, it's seeing values that aren't empty (non-zero), and exports them as such. The result is more disk space is used and takes longer to export the disk.
VMware Workstation as well as Server and ESX server all include a tool to "shrink" a disk, but VMware Player doesn't. … I've been looking for an "offline" VMware disk shrink utility, but I'm unable to find one.
documented on: August 16, 2006
The VMWare command line utility, vmware-vdiskmanager.exe, does perform offline image shrinking. You simply issue the command "vmware-vdiskmanager -k mydisk.vmdk" (while the VM is NOT running) and it will shrink it. This utility sounds like it's included with VMWare Server (although I haven't confirmed this yet), which can be downloaded for free. If that's true, then all the necessary tools for this procedure are available free of charge.
Please note that this only covers the second step in the two step process of shrinking a virtual disk. The first step requires wiping (zero-filling) all the unused space on the disk including any previously deleted files. This step varies depending on the guest OS and must be done from INSIDE the running VM.
For Linux (and probably most *nix-like OSs), a simple series of commands can accomplish this task, such as "cat /dev/zero > zero.fill;sync;sleep 1;sync;rm -f zero.fill". This will create an enormous zero-filled file that completely fills the disk and then deletes that file. In most file systems (but not all), this will zero-over all the unused disk space including anything left over from previously deleted files.
For Windows guest OSs, there are probably a lot of freeware apps that can accomplish the same thing. Note: You may want to empty out the recycle bin before zero-filling the free space to maximize the amount of space recovered.
Once the free space has been zero-filled, shut down the VM and run the vmware-vdiskmanager tool on the target vmdk file.
documented on: November 24th, 2006 by Guest
You could try 'vmkfstool -i vmdkFile -d thin vmdkFile2'.
That should clone the disk as a "thin" disk so without allocating all the space. You can then get rid of the original vmdkFile and use vmdkFile2 in its place.
documented on: September 20th, 2006 by lazyllama
a much simpler way IMO is to
Dump an image of your VM to DVD or another file by using acronis, ghost, selfimage or whatever. Provided you have networking enabled you can dump your image to a network file from within the VM itself if you want to — although on restore you'll need a bootable recovery disk and network access.
Delete the VM from disk.
Define a new VM with the disk size you want
power on a VM with a copy of PARTED / Partition Manager/ a BartPE disk
create your partition with the actual disk size you want the VM to "See".
restore your VM using whatever software you used to dump the image with.
documented on: Jul 11, 2006 by jimbo45
VMware's built-in clone virtual machine method is no good for disk shrinking:
cloned HD is still pre-allocated
Configured but not used HD is also cloned.
So, the VMware's built-in clone virtual machine method is to give you a full snapshot of everything possibly linked to the virtual machine. Not good for single drive image backup.
documented on: 2006-12-03