Shrink Hard Disk (SCSI) in Workstation?

kenw232 · 06-06-2015, 11:45 AM

I have a VM that was about 120GB I wanted to migrate to a vSphere server. I had to reduce the amount to space used by the VM so it could fit so I did that - these first two screenshots show it was reduced to about 20GB on disk:
http://sites.extremehosting.ca/trash/space1.jpg
http://sites.extremehosting.ca/trash/space2.jpg

But the size of the VM's Hard Drive is still 120GB which won't fit onto my vSphere server. VMware Converter gives and error because of it:
http://sites.extremehosting.ca/trash/space4.jpg

How do I resize this 120GB Hard Drive down to about 30GB so I can get it moved to vSphere?
http://sites.extremehosting.ca/trash/space3.jpg

jefro · 06-06-2015, 02:54 PM

Once you create a hard drive virtual or physical it isn't easy to reduce it. Generally one takes the active partitions and reduce them. Then they copy the smaller partitions.

Some vm import or P2V apps can do this in the process.

kenw232 · 06-06-2015, 04:58 PM

I've done the reducing in size. I've cleared the free space, shrunk the partition, compacted. Thats why its only 20GB on disk (space actually used by the guest VM). There has to be a way to just change the size of the VM from 120GB to 30GB.

jefro · 06-06-2015, 07:31 PM

But you didn't copy the system to a new smaller drive first. The drive is still large. (guess I may misunderstand too)

What does disk information say the size of the drive is still? Not partition, drive.

kenw232 · 06-06-2015, 08:45 PM

Yes, I see fdisk -l says its still a 120+GB hard drive:
http://sites.extremehosting.ca/trash/size.jpg

But gparted shows its just mostly empty & unallocated space now:
http://sites.extremehosting.ca/trash/gparted.jpg

How do I shrink /dev/sda to 30GB then?

syg00 · 06-06-2015, 09:47 PM

Has to be done by the hypervisor, not the guest.
Quick search indicates can't be done on pre-allocated (guest) disk images. May be out-of-date info of course.

DVOM · 06-17-2015, 07:06 PM

This is how I've done it:

vmware shrink

kenw232 · 06-17-2015, 11:51 PM

I ended up having to add a second hard drive to the VM, copy the partition/drive from one to the other, then delete the first and fix the boot sector on the second when it doesn't boot.

jefro · 06-18-2015, 05:40 PM

DVOM way may have worked.
Forgot about the tools.

The clone method would have worked but some distros would require edits based on the drive now being different. uuid or device by name