Shrinking VMFS in ESX

http://spininfo.homelinux.com/news/Virtual_Machine_and_Guest_OS/2007/04/19/How_to_shrink_or_grow_(extend)_a_virtual_machines_disk

Now where is that command to shrink VMFS files in ESX3.5? Well, sadly there is no such command as yet and the method which I used is to shrink it first and then clone over to another smaller VMFS.

SPININFO, the site above provides great step by step information and solutions for resizing VMFS; do drop over and have a look.

Software which I’ve used for this purpose:

a. Gparted    – To resize the partition in the VMFS
b. Clonezilla  – To duplicate the data into a smaller VMFS 

1. Create an additional Virtual Harddrive with the new size in the guest server which you would need to shrink.

2. Using Gparted, shrink the partition to the desired size.

3. Boot up the Machine once into the OS to ensure everything is working. *skipping this step will cause cloning to fail later on.

4. Using Clonezilla, clone the repartitioned drive to the new harddrive.  *Under clonezilla, uncheck the default -g-auto option. Choose Y to clone the Boot Loader.

 

Done.  Don’t forget to perform some test like scandisk to check for disk/data integrity.