1,798
edits
Changes
no edit summary
This HowTo covers the steps necessary to shrink a VMware Server 2.0 virtual disk. Two techniques are available, one involving VMware Tools and the another using the commandline command line ''vmware-vdiskmanager'' tool. Both approaches will be covered in this guide.
Before beginning this process it is important to understand a few points:
* Shrinking reduces the amount of space a virtual disk currently occupies on the host system. It does not reduce the size of the disk as far as any guest operating systems using the disk are concerned. When more disk space is needed by a guest, VMware increases the size of the virtual disk image to accommodate the guest. This process is repeated in increments as more space is needed until the maximum specified virtual disk size is reached.
== Shrinking a Virtual Disk from the Command Line ==
The size of a VMware virtual disk may be reduced from the command line using the ''vmware-vdiskmanager''tool. If the disk to be shrunk is pre-allocated it must first be converted to a growable disk, the syntax for which is:
vmware-vdiskmanager -r ''<oldfilename>.vmdk'' -t ''<type> <newfilename>.vmdk''
