Does this happen automatically with the steps listed above?
#How to delete vmdk files from datastore free#
After running your steps, I want to “fix” the free space listed in the parent datastore for this VM (or VMs).
#How to delete vmdk files from datastore windows#
After your steps, 60 GB used since Windows has 60GB used.ģ. After running the steps outlined in your post, the free space in the VMDK will be aligned with the actual free space in the OS? e.g. In VMware, the Provisioned Space represents how much space I set the size of the TP VMDK disk to be, and Used Space is how much of that VMDK is no longer considered free space by VMware?Ģ. Am I correct in assuming the following:ġ. Why not follow on Twitter for more like this! There we have it, all that free space, now reclaimed. vmdkĬheck the size again (will now be less): du -h. Punch all zeroed blocks out of the VMDK: vmkfstools -punchzero. Next we will shut down the guest OS and SSH into the ESX shell, once in the shell we need to navigate to the VMDK’s datastore -> directory and we’ll check the VM’s actual size: du -h. with the relevant path to a location on the target storage device. As of v1.6 -c and -z have changed meanings, many instructions say -c zeros free space, this is no longer the case, it zeros the space then fills with random data in accordance with DOD spec: DOD 5220.22-M, the trigger to zero space with 0x00 has changed to -z! On linux guests use: dd if=/dev/zero of=//zeroes bs=4096 & rm -f //zeroes This will fill any unused space on the drive specified with zero-blocks.Ĭaution: This operation will expand your thin-disk to its maximum size, ensure your datastore has the capacity to do this before you run this operation. Sysinternals tool SDelete (replace the with the relevant Windows drive letter) you must use v1.6 or later!: sdelete.exe -z To shrink a VMDK we can use an ESX command line tool “vmkfstools”, but first you have to zero out any free space on your thin provisioned disk.
This will just reduce the VMDK’s usage on the VMFS datastore NOT resize the “provisioned size” of a thin disk. Some things should be simple, shrinking a thin provisioned virtual disk should be one of them, it’s not.
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