Comments on: How to Shrink a VMware Guest in VMware Workstation/ VMware GSX Server/, VMware Server. And… VMware Server lets you do something new!

By: greg t

greg t — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 21:58:00 +0000

I "shrunk" a vdisk as described; however, it appears that it created a snapshot. There is a new smaller vdisk file but it is linked to the original file.

I prepared the vdisk by mounting the disk and calling the vmware-vdiskmanager -p option. Then I unmounted the vdisk and called the -k option. There were two files. When I moved the original file. I got an error about not finding the parent file.

What did I miss?

By: caic

caic — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 07:20:00 +0000

Hi,

I downloaded the last version of vmware server (VMware-server-1.0.5-80187.tar.gz) but vmware-vdiskmanager doesn't have "-k" option.

Is there a later release? I'm desperate looking for the way of shrinking my vmdk files in my linux host.

Thank you very much!

By: Chuck Whealton

Chuck Whealton — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:39:00 +0000

Thanks for this information. I'm sure it's in "the manual" somewhere, but I was having a bad time finding any good information (quickly) outside of your article.

Your prerequisite section is what did it for me. In VMware WS 6.0, I performed the preparation phase, and was then prompted as to whether or not I wanted to shrink the disk right then and there.

I didn't have to use the vmware-vdiskmanager.exe program outside of this process.

Worked like a champ.

Thanks!
Charles R. Whealton
Charles Whealton @ pleasedontspam.com