Hello all,
I'd like to seek your help in shrinking the data files consumed by one VM.
Back story:
Implementer partitions "large" 500GB VM for a system. Realistically, 150GB is enough space for the application copied twice over + the OS.
Implementer no longer wants to re-do this VM. They don't seem so proficient at ESXi, or RHEL anyway.
I want to reclaim the 350GB extra space so I can use this for smaller VMs and for future use for the larger ones. I only have 2TB (realistically, it's 1.6TB when you account for swap and formatting) of space so 350GB is big for me.
ESXi details
Version 6.5 U2, Lenovo Customized Image
Bloated Guest OS in Question
Red Hat 5.8 32 bit
Partitioned 'standard' (not LVM)
ext3
I can gparted the Guest OS to the point wherein the partitioned space only shows 150GB, with the 350GB as unallocated.
However, I no longer know what to do to have ESXi shrink the actual files/disks.
I have tried editing the VMDK file and editing the extent figures, unregistering the VM, moving the VM to another datastore.
When I do this, the VM 'thinks' it is now the smaller file, but the physical size of the vmdk-flat file still shows the larger value. The same large value shows up when monitoring the VMs, and doing an ls -lh on the ESXi CLI.
All the googles I've done don't really have a clear cut answer on this since the official answer is that this kind of move is is unsupported (?)
Is there any other way I can shrink this VM?
My experience level with ESXi - noob - I have setup a few and am using the cheapo 600$ version of ESXi (It's called the VSphere Essentials) without vmotion since I'm sitting on just one host so far.
Also, for future questions, is there any where like w3 schools where I can search this? The VMWare forums, while helpful, show a lot of very old topics and the commands of which are no longer relevant at this time.
I'm reading up about cloning the hard disk. I suppose this is actually possible... Clonezilla perhaps?
Thanks!
I'd like to seek your help in shrinking the data files consumed by one VM.
Back story:
Implementer partitions "large" 500GB VM for a system. Realistically, 150GB is enough space for the application copied twice over + the OS.
Implementer no longer wants to re-do this VM. They don't seem so proficient at ESXi, or RHEL anyway.
I want to reclaim the 350GB extra space so I can use this for smaller VMs and for future use for the larger ones. I only have 2TB (realistically, it's 1.6TB when you account for swap and formatting) of space so 350GB is big for me.
ESXi details
Version 6.5 U2, Lenovo Customized Image
Bloated Guest OS in Question
Red Hat 5.8 32 bit
Partitioned 'standard' (not LVM)
ext3
I can gparted the Guest OS to the point wherein the partitioned space only shows 150GB, with the 350GB as unallocated.
However, I no longer know what to do to have ESXi shrink the actual files/disks.
I have tried editing the VMDK file and editing the extent figures, unregistering the VM, moving the VM to another datastore.
When I do this, the VM 'thinks' it is now the smaller file, but the physical size of the vmdk-flat file still shows the larger value. The same large value shows up when monitoring the VMs, and doing an ls -lh on the ESXi CLI.
All the googles I've done don't really have a clear cut answer on this since the official answer is that this kind of move is is unsupported (?)
Is there any other way I can shrink this VM?
My experience level with ESXi - noob - I have setup a few and am using the cheapo 600$ version of ESXi (It's called the VSphere Essentials) without vmotion since I'm sitting on just one host so far.
Also, for future questions, is there any where like w3 schools where I can search this? The VMWare forums, while helpful, show a lot of very old topics and the commands of which are no longer relevant at this time.
I'm reading up about cloning the hard disk. I suppose this is actually possible... Clonezilla perhaps?
Thanks!
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